Scarlet and Hyssop: A Novel

It has been ordained by the wisdom of Nature that the same fact shall strike the majority of her foolish children almost simultaneously. This phenomenon can hardly have escaped the most casual observer; the majority of swallows, for instance, in any given area will agree, practically in the same week, that our English autumn is no longer tolerable, and with consenting twitterings set their heads southwards; or in the spring, again, one may observe that in any given field daisies and buttercups will determine, only to be nipped by unpunctual frosts, that it is now time to come out, while even man, that most vacillating and least uniform of all created things, has a certain sympathy in his sensations; the sap stirs with moderately equal effervescence in the most dissimilar units; and without further preamble, to take the case in point, London settles without consultation, but with considerable unanimity, when spring may be considered to have stopped and summer to have begun. It is hardly necessary to state that London is, if not always, at any rate very frequently, completely deceived—like the buttercups and daisies—about a point so apparently palpable as even this, and a few biting frosts about mid-May usually send it back to its furs again; but the fact remains that on or about the same day the streets suddenly wear a completely different garb. On all sides the chrysalises burst, and butterflies gay or sober, according to their temperaments, hover and try their wings over a ground strewn, so to speak, with the brown husks of the "winter weeds outworn." Nor is this bursting of the chrysalis confined to externals: the time has come; the tides of vitality turn and flow through the town, and the reopened houses, newly decked window-boxes, and the flush of colour in the streets, are but symptomatic of the inward conviction of their inhabitants that a fresh season for doing a quantity of things they should not do, and as great an opportunity for leaving undone many things that they should do, has been turned up by the spade of Time, that irresponsible farmer of years. Though not usually given to prosing, Lady Alston had been making remarks somewhat to this effect as she sat with Mrs. Brereton after lunch in a balconied window of her drawing-room in Park Lane looking over the haze and warmth of the Park. Being for the moment, at any rate, in a pessimistic mood, she accounted for it by a belittling explanation.