“ ‘From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I.’

“George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don’t believe in this world sorrow.”

Miss Honeychurch assented.

“Then make my boy think like us. Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes⁠—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”

Suddenly she laughed; surely one ought to laugh. A young man melancholy because the universe wouldn’t fit, because life was a tangle or a wind, or a Yes, or something!