 CHAPTER XXV But after Lois had gone, Rosie came to life again. That is, she entered once more the conditions in which her mind was free to trade its round of grief. Lois kept her out of them. Her father and mother did the same. Household duties, the task of the hot house, and the necessity for eating and sleeping and speaking, did the same. She turned from them all, with her weariness as consuming as a sickness unto death. She had done so from the instant when, crouching behind the vines at the Cucumber-house, with all her senses strained, she perceived by the mere rustling of the leaves that Claude was making his way down the long, green aisle. She knew then that it was the end. If there had been no other cause of rupture between them, the girl who kept ten or twelve servants would have created it. Rosie knew enough of Claude to be aware that love could not bear down the scale against this princeliness of living. There would be no such repentance and reaction on his part as she had experienced with Thor. Once he was gone, he was gone. It was the end. The soft opening and closing of the hot house door as he went out reached her like a sigh, a last sigh, a dying sigh, after which nothing. Rosie expected nothing, but she waited. She waited as watchers wait round a death-bed for the possibility of one more breath. But none came. She stirred then, and rose. She rose mechanically, brushing the earth from her clothing, and began again the interrupted task of picking the superfluous female flowers and letting them flutter downward. It was when she had come to the end of her third row and was about to turn into the fourth that the sense of the impossibility of going on swept over her. Oh, I can't! she dropped her arms to her side. I can't! I can't! She meant only that she couldn't go on just then. But in the back of her mind there was the conviction that she would never go on again. She continued to stand with her arms hanging and head drooped to one side, closed in by vines with flowers of the hue of light around her like a halo and bees murmuring among them. It was not merely that she was listless and incapable. The world seemed to have dropped away. She was marooned on a rock with an ocean of nothingness about her. Everything she wanted had gone, sunk, vanished. It had come within sight like mirage to the shipwrecked, only to torture her with what she couldn't have. It was worse than it ever had never shown itself at all. Love had appeared with one man, money with the other. Love and money were two of the three things she cared for. The poor, shiftless family was the third. Since the first two had gone, the last must follow them. Contrously and deliberately Rosie lifted her hands with a little lamentable effort, letting them drop again. And so renounced her burden. She crept back to the spot when she had risen and lay down. There was a kind of ritual in the act. It was not now a mere stricken physical crouching as when she had turned away from Claude. It was something more significant. It was withdrawal from work, from life, from all the demands she had put forth so fiercely. Rosie also renounced Claude. It was a proof of the degree to which she had dismissed him, that when, a half hour later, she heard a rustling in the vines behind her. It never occurred to her that he might have come back. She knew already that he would never come back. The fatalism of her little soul left her none of those uncertainties which were safeguards against despair. She raised her head and looked. But she saw exactly the person she knew she would see. Antonio grinned and announced dinner. The sight of his young mistress, half sitting, half lying on the ground, struck him as droll. Rosie got up and brushed herself again. She knew it must be dinnertime. The fact had been at the back of her mind all through these minutes of comforting negation. But she should have been in the house laying the table while her mother cooked the meal. It was the first time in years that she had rebelled against her duty. It was not exactly rebellion now. It was something more serious than that. She realized it as she stood where she was, with hands hanging limply, and said to herself, I've quit. Nevertheless, she emerged slowly from the jungle of vines and followed Antonio down the long, rustling isle. There was a compulsion in the day's routine to which she felt the necessity of yielding. She had traversed half the length of the greenhouse before it came to her that it was precisely to the day's routine that she couldn't return. Anything was better than that. Any fate was preferable to the round of cooking and cleaning and seed-time and harvest of which every detail was impregnated with the ambitions she had given up. She had lived through these tasks and beyond them, out into something else, into a great emptiness in which her spirit found a kind of ease. She could no more go back to then than the released soul could go back to earth. In the yard she stood looking at the poor, battered old house. Inside her father, who probably by this time returned from town, would be sitting down to table. Antonio, to save the serving of two sets of meals, would be sitting down with him. Her mother would be bringing something from the kitchen, holding a hot platter with the corner of her apron. If she went in, her mother would sit down, too, while she herself would do the running, to and fro between the table and the pantry or the stove. She would snatch a bite for herself in the intervals of attendance. Rosie revolted. She revolted not against the drudgery which was part of the matter of course of living, unless one kept a girl. She revolted against the living itself. It was all over for her. Improved that it was. She turned her back on it. Her moving away was at first without purpose. If her feet strayed into the familiar path that ran down the hill between the hot houses and the apple trees, it was because there was no other direction to take. She hadn't meant to go out through the wood to duck-rock before she found herself doing it. The newly-leafing oaks were a shimmer of bronze-green above her, while she trod on young ferns that formed a carpet such as was never woven by hands. Enter it were worked white star-flowers without number, with an occasional nodding trillium. The faint, bitter scent of green things too tender as yet to be pungent rose from everything she crushed. She was not soothed by nature, like Thor Masterman. She had too much to do with the raising of plants for sale to take much interest in what the earth produced without money and without price. If it had not been that her mind was as nearly as possible empty of thought, she wouldn't have paused to watch an indigo bunting, whose little brown mate was probably nearby, hop upward from branch to branch of a solitary juniper, his body like a blue flower in the dark boughs, when he poured forth a song that waxed louder as he mounted. She observed him idly and passed onward, because there was nothing but that to do. Her heart was too dead to feel much emotion when she merged on the spot where she had been accustomed to keep her trists with Claude. Her trists with Claude had been at night. She had other sorts of association with this summit in the daytime. All her life she had been used to come here burying. Here she came to with Polly Wilson and other girlfriends, when she had any, for strolls and gossiping. Here, too, Jim Breener made love to her, a mat's companion of the grocery. The spot being therefore not wholly dedicated to memories of Claude, she could approach it calmly. She sat down on the familiar seat that circled the oak tree and gave the best view over the pond. The oak tree was the last and highest of the wood. Beyond it there was only an upward-climbing fringe of grass, starved with sunk-foil and wild strawberry, and then the precipice. It was but a miniature precipice that broke to a miniature sea, but it gave an impression of grandeur. Sitting on the bench, with one's head against the oak, one could, if one chose, see nothing but sky and water. There was nothing but sky and water and air. In the noon stillness there was not even a boat on the lake, nor a bird on the wing. The only sounds were those of a hammering far over on the thorny estate, the humming of an electric car, which at this distance was no more disturbing than the murmur of a bee, and the song of the indigo bunting, fluting now from the treetop. To Rosie it was peace, peace without pleasure, but without pain, as nearly as might be that absorption into nothingness for which she earned as the Buddhist seats absorption into God. She rested, not suffering, at least not suffering anything she could feel. She was beyond the grief. The only thing she was not beyond was the horror of returning to the interests that had hitherto made up life. As for Claude, she could think of him when she began doing so with singular detachment. The whole episode with him might have been ended years before. It was like something which no longer perturbs, though the memory of it is vivid. She could go back and reconstruct the experience from the first. Up to the present she had never found any opportunity of doing that, since each meeting with him was so soul-filling in itself. Now that she had the leisure, she found herself using it as the afternoon wore on. Being on the spot where she had first met him, she could re-enact the scene. She knew the very Raspberry Byron of which she had been at work. She went to it and lifted it up. It was a spiny, red-brown, sprawling thing just beginning to clothe itself with leaves. It had been breast-high when she had picked the fruit from it, and Claude had stood over there, in that patch of common breaks which then rose above his knees, but was now a bed of delicate, elongated sprays leaning backward with incomparable grace. She found the heart to sing. Her voice, which used to be strong enough, euling her but the ghost of song, as the notes of an old spinet gave back the ghosts of music long ago did. Oh, Merck! Merck is the midnight hour and loud the tempest's roar. Away for wanderer seeks thy tower. Lord Gregory, open thy door. She could not remember having so much as hummed this air since the day Claude had interrupted it. But she went on, unfilteringly, to the lines of which she had broken in. At least be pity to me shown, if love it may not be. She didn't falter, even here. She only allowed her voice to trail away in the old pianissimo into which she had frightened her. She stopped then and went through the conversation that ensued on that memorable day, and of which the very words were imprinted on her heart. Isn't it, Rosie? I'm Claude. She hadn't smiled on that occasion. But she smiled to herself now. A ghost of a smile to match her ghost of a voice, because his tone had been so sweet. She'd never heard anything like it before, and since, only in his moments of endearment. But she went home at last. She went home because the May afternoon grew chilly, and in the gathering of shadows beneath the oaks there was something eerie. Expecting a scene or a scolding, she was surprised to find both mother and father calm. They'd evidently exchanged views concerning her, deciding that she'd better indulge her whims. When she refused to eat, they made little or no protest, and only once during the night did her mother cross the passage to ask Fredfully why she didn't go to bed. On the following day there was the same silent acknowledgement of her right to refuse to work, and of her freedom to absent herself. Rosie was quite clear as to what had taken place. Antonio had betrayed the fact of Claude's visit, and her parents had sent it a hopeless love affair. Rosie was indifferent. Her love affairs were her own business. She owed neither explanation nor apology to any one. So long as her parents conceded her liberty to come and go, to nibble rather than to eat, and not to speak when spoken to, she was content. They conceded this all through that week. In her presence they bore themselves with timid constraint, and followed her with stealthy eyes, a watch for every shadow that crossed her face. But they let her alone. She was as free as wind, all Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. During those days she continued to live in the exultation of the void. There was nothing to fear any more. The worst had happened to her that could happen, and so, in a manner of speaking, she was safe. Never since she had begun to think had she been so free from misgiving and foreboding as to what each new day would bring forth. No day could bring forth anything that could hurt her. By Saturday the nerves of sensation began to show signs of recovering themselves and returning to activity. In thinking of Claude and living through again her meetings with him, there were moments like pangs of longing, of passion, of despair, as the case might be, that went as quickly as they came. But they didn't frighten her. If they were premonitions of a state of anguish, why there had been so much anguish in her episode with Claude that there couldn't be much more now? If anything, she welcomed it, it would be more as if he was back with her. The void was peaceful, but the void filled with suffering on his account would be better still. Anything, anything but to be forced to go back. But on Monday it was the urgency of going back that confronted her. She had come down in the morning to find her breakfast laid in just the way she liked it. Tea, a soft boiled egg, buttered toast, and as a special temptation to her capricious appetite, a dab of marmalade. She sat down to the table unwillingly, sipping at the tea and nibbling at the toast, but leaving the egg and the marmalade untouched. In her mother's bustling to and fro, she felt the long delayed protest in the atmosphere. It came when her mother was crossing the room to replace some dishes on the dresser. Now, my girl, back up. Just eat your breakfast and set to work and stop your foolish fancies. If you don't look out, you get yourself where I was, and I guess it'll take more than Dr. Hillary to pull you out. She added as she returned to the kitchen. Your father told me to get you busy on the cucumbers. There's a lot to be picked. He's been spanning them and finds them ready. Rose made use of her privilege of not answering. When she'd eaten all she could, she took a basket and made her way toward the cucumber-house. She had not entered since she had left it with the words, I've quit. It was like going to the scaffold to drag her feet across the yard. It was like mounting it to lift the latch of the paintless door and feel the stifling, pollen-laden air in her face. Nevertheless, habit took her in. Habit sent her eyes searching among the lowest stretches of the vines, where the cool green things were hanging. Habit caused her to stoop and span them with her rough little hand. When her father's thumb and fingers met around them, they were ready to be picked. They were ready when her own came within an inch of doing so. But she raised herself with a rebellious impulse of her whole person before she had picked one. She picked hundreds in her time. She picked thousands. She couldn't begin again. With the first one she gathered, the yoke of the past would be around her neck once more. She couldn't bear it. I can't. I can't. With the words on her lips she slipped out by the door at the far end of the hot-house and sped towards her refuge on Duck Rock. She had never felt it so truly a refuge before. Neither had she ever before needed a refuge so acutely. She needed it today because the memory of Claude had at last become a living thing, and every sentient part of her that could be filled with grief was filled with it. Grief had come suddenly. It was creating a new world for her. It was no longer a peaceful void. It was a world of wild passions, wild projects, wild things she would do, wild words she would speak if ever she had the chance to speak them. She would go in search of him. She would find his father and mother. She would appeal to Thor. She would discover the girl with ten or twelve servants who had come between them. She would implore them all to send him back. She would drag him back. She would hang about his neck till he swore never again to leave her. If he refused, she would kill him. If she couldn't kill him, she would kill herself. Perhaps if she killed herself she would inflict on him the worst suffering of all. She thought about that. After all, it was the thing most practical. The other impulses were not practical. She knew that, of course. She could humiliate herself to the dust without affecting him. Up to to-day she had not wanted him to suffer. But now she did. If she killed herself, he would suffer. However long he lived or however many servants the woman he married would be able to keep, his life would be poisoned by the memory of what he had done to her. Her imagination reveled in the scenes it was now able to depict. Leaning back with her head resting against the trunk of the Eld Oak, she closed her eyes and viewed the dramatic procession of events that might follow on that morning and haunt Claude Masterman to his grave. She saw herself leaping from the rock. She saw her body washed ashore, her head and hands hanging limp, her long wet hair streaming. She saw her parents mourning and full remorseful, and Claude absolutely stricken. Her efforts rested there. Everything was subordinate to the one great fact that by doing this she could make the sword go through his heart. She went to the edge of the cliff and peered over. Though it was a sheer fifty feet it didn't seem so very far down. The water was blue, unlapping, and inviting. It looked as if it would be easy. She returned to her seat. She knew she was only playing. It relieved the tumult within her to pretend that she could do as desperately as she felt. It quieted her. Once she saw that she had it in her power to make Claude unhappy. Something in her spirit was appeased. She began the little comedy all over again, from the minute when she started forth from home on the momentous day to fill her pan with raspberries. She traced her steps down the hill and up through the blades of the bluff wherever the ripe raspberries were hanging. She came to the minute when her stage directions called for Lord Gregory, and she sang it with the same thin silvery piping which was all she could contribute now to the demand of the drama. It was both an annoyance and a surprise to hear a footfall and the swish of robes, and to turn and see Lois Willoughby. Beyond the fact that she couldn't help it, she didn't know why she became at once so taciturn and repellent. Oh, she'll come again, she said in self-excuse, and with vague ideas of atonement after Lois had gone away. Besides, the things that Lois had said in the way of solicitude, sympathy, and God made no appeal to her. If she felt regret, it was from obscure motives of compassion, since this woman, too, had missed what was best in love. She would have returned to her dream had her dream returned to her, but Lois had broken the spell. Rose, you could no longer get the ecstasies of reenactment. Reenactment itself became a foolish thing, the husk of what had once been fruit. It was a new phase of loss. Everything went but her misery and her desire to strike at Lord. That, and the sense that whatever she did, and no matter how elusive she made herself, she would have to go back to the old life at last. She struggled against the conviction, but it settled on her like a mist. She played a game with the rasperabine. She sang Lord Gregory. She peered over the brink of the toy precipice, but she evoked nothing. She stood as close to the edge of the cliff as she dared, whipping and lashing and taunting her imagination by the rashness of the act. Nothing came, but the commonplace suggestion that even if she fell in, the boat which had appeared on the lake and for which two men were fishing would rescue her. The worse she would get would be a wetting and perhaps a cold. She wouldn't drown. Common sense took possession of her. The thing for her to do, it told her cruelly, was to go back and pick the cucumbers. After that there would be some other job. In the market garden business jobs were endless, especially in spring. She could set about them with a better heart since, after all that had happened, Archie Masterman couldn't refuse Nair to renew the lease. He wouldn't have the face to refuse it, so common sense expressed itself, when his son had done her such a wrong. If she had scored no other victory, her suffering would at least have secured that. It was an argument of which she couldn't but feel the weight. There would be three more years of just managing to live, three more years of sowing and planting and watering and watching, at the end of which they would not quite have starved, while Matt would have had a hole in which to hide himself on coming out of jail. Decidedly it was an argument. She had already shown her willingness to sell herself, and this would apparently prove to be her price. Wearily when noon had passed and afternoon set in, she got herself to her feet. Wearily she began to descend the hill. She would go back again to the cucumbers. She would take up again the burden she had thrown down. She would bring her wild heart into harness, and tame it to hopelessness. Common sense could suggest nothing else. She went now by the path, because it was torturous and less direct than the beeline of a fern. She paused at every excuse. Now to watch a robin hopping. Now to look at a pink lady's slipper, a bloom in a bed of stream-wort. Now for no reason at all. Each step cost her a separate act of renunciation. Each act of renunciation was harder than the other, but successive steps and successive acts brought her down the hill at last. I can't. I can't. She dragged herself a few paces farther still. I can't. I can't. She was inside of the boulevard where a gang of Finns were working, and beyond which lay the ragged, uncultivated outskirts of her father's land. Up through a tangle of nettles and yarrow she could see the zigzag path which had been the rainbow bridge of her happiness. She came to a dead stop, the back of her hand pressed against her mouth fearfully. If I go up there, she said to herself, I shall never come down again. She meant that she would never come down again in the same spirit. That spirit would be captured and slain. She herself would be captured and slain. Nothing would live of her but a body to drudge in the hot house to earn a few cents a day. Suddenly without forming a resolution or directing an intention, she turned and sped up the hill. At first she only walked rapidly, but the walk broke into a run, and the run into a swift skimming along through the trees like that of a roused partridge. And yet she didn't know what she was running from. Something within her, a power of guardedness, or that capacity for common sense which had made it's last desperate effort to get the upper hand, had broken down. Or she could yield to, was the terror that paralyzed thought, or she could respond to, was the force that drew her up the hill with its awful fascination. I must do it. I must. Were the words with which she met her own impulse to resist. If her confused thought could have become explanatory, it would have said, I must get away from the life I've known, from the care, from the hope, from the love. I must do something that will make Claude suffer. I must frighten him. I must wound him. I must strike at the girl who has won him away with her ten or twelve servants. And there's no way but this. Even so, the way was obscure to her. She was taking it without seeing whether it was to lead. If one impulse warned her to stop, another whipped her onward. I can't stop. I can't stop! she cried out when warning became alarm. For flight gave impetus to itself. It was like release. It was a kind of wild lee. She was as a bird whose wings have been bound and whose worked them free again. There was a frenzy and sheer speed. The path was steep. But she was hardly aware of so much as touching it. Fear behind and anguish within her carried her along. She scarcely knew that she was running breathlessly, that she panted, that once or twice she stumbled and fell. Something was beckoning to her from the great, safe, empty void. Something that was nothing, unless it was peace and sleep. Something that had its abode in the free spaces of the wind, and the blue caverns of the sky, and the kindly lapping water. Something infinite and eternal and restful. In whose embrace she was due. At the edge of the wood she had a last terrifying moment. The raspberry-bine was there, and the great oak with the seat around it, and the carpet of sink-foil and swiled strawberry. She gave them a quick frightened look like an appeal to impede her. If she was to stop, she must stop now. But I can't stop! she seemed to fling to them over her shoulder, as she kept on to where beyond the highest tip of Greenswood the blue level of the lake appeared. The boat with the tooth-fisherman was nearer the shore than when she had observed it last. They'll save me, or they'll save me! She had time to whisper to herself at the supreme moment when she left everything behind. There followed a space which in Rosy's consciousness was long. She felt that she was leaping, flying out into the welcoming void, and that the promise of rest and peace had not deceived her. But it was in the shock of falling that sanity returned, and all that the tense little creature had been, and tried to be, and couldn't be, and longed to be, and feared to be, and failed to be, broke into a cry at which the fisherman dropped their rods. End of Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Of The Side of the Angels by Basil King This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Simon Evers Chapter 26 Thor, would you mind if I went away for a little while? He looked at her across the luncheon table, but her eyes were downcast. Though she endeavoured to maintain the non-committal attitude she'd taken up at breakfast, she couldn't meet his gaze. If you went away, Yeko Blankley, why should you do that? I've been to see—she found a difficulty in pronouncing the name. I've been to see Rosie. She's rather upset. Under the swift lifting of her lids, he betrayed his self-consciousness. I suppose so. He kept to the most laconic form of speech in order to leave no opening to her penetration. And I thought if I could take her away, where would you go? Or anywhere, that wouldn't matter. To New York, perhaps. That might interest her. But anywhere so long as— He got out his consent while making an excuse for rising from the table. The conversation was too difficult to sustain. It was without looking at him that she said, as he was leaving the room. Then I go and ask her at once. I dare say she won't come, but I can try. It will give me an excuse for going back. I feel worried at having left her at all. Between three and four that afternoon she entered her husband's office hurriedly. It was Mrs. Diorov who received her. Do you know where Dr. Masterman is? Do you know where he expected to call this afternoon? Brightstone, because I had a card hanging on the wall. It was to have seen Mrs. Gibson, number 10, suits the street sometimes through the day. Lola made no secret of her agitation. Have they a telephone? How dumb and hardly, only a poor charwoman. Was he going anywhere at all where they could have a telephone? Mrs. Diorov, having mentioned the possibilities, ladies rang up house after house. She left the same message everywhere. Four was to be asked to come directly to his office where she was awaiting him. It was after four when he appeared. She met him in the little entry, and, taking him by the arm, drew him into the waiting room. Come in, four dear, come in. She knew by his eyes that he suspected something of what she had to tell. Caught me the long years, he tried to say in a natural voice, but he could hardly force the words beyond his lips. It's Rosy Thor, she said instantly. She's all right. He dropped into a chair, supporting himself onto the rounder table strewn with illustrated papers and magazines for the entertainment of waiting patients. His lips moved, but no sound passed them. Long dark shadows streaked the powder of his face. She sat down beside him, covering his hands with her own. She's all right, four dear, now, and I don't think she'll be any the worse for it in the end. She may be the better. We can't tell yet, but you haven't heard it in the village, have you? He shook his head, perhaps because he was dazed, perhaps because he didn't trust himself to speak. That's good, she spoke breathlessly. I was so afraid you might. I wanted to tell you myself so that you wouldn't get a shock. There's no reason for a shock, not now, Thor. It's only just what I was afraid of, what I spoke of at lunch. She did it. He found strength to speak. She did what? Lola continued the same breathless way. She threw herself into the pond, but she's all right. Jim Breen and Robbie Willet were out on a boat, fishing. They saw her. They got to her, just as she went down the second time. Jim Breen dived after her and brought her up. She was unconscious very long, and fortunately Dr Hill was close by at Old Mrs Jux's in Schoolhouse Lane. So she's home now, and all right, or nearly. I arrived just as they were bringing her ashore. She was breathing then. I went on before them to the house. I told Mrs Faye and Mr Faye I saw them put at her bed. She's all right, and then I came here to tell you, Thor. He struggled to his feet, throwing his head back and clenching his fists. I swear to God that if I ever see Thor again, I'll kill him! Without rising she caught one of his hands and pulled him downward. Sit down, Thor, she said in a tenor command. You mustn't take it like that. You mustn't make things worse than they are. The bad enough as it is, they're so bad, or at least so hard for some of us, that we must do everything we can to make it possible to bear them. He sat down at her bidding, but with elbows resting on the table, he covered his face with his hands. She clasped her own and sat looking at him. That is, she sat looking at his strong knuckles and at the shock of dark hair that fell over the fingertips where the nails dug into his forehead. She felt a great pity for him. But a pity that permitted her to sit there, watchful, detached, not as if it was Thor, but someone else. There would be an end now to silences and concealments. She saw that already. He was making no further attempt to keep her in the dark. In the shock of the moment, all the barricades he had built around his secret life had fallen like the walls of Jericho. She had nothing to do but walk upward and inward and take possession. All was open. There was neither shrine nor sanctuary any longer. It was no privilege to be admitted thus. Anybody would have been admitted who sat beside him as she was sitting now. But in the end the paroxysm passed and his hands came down. I know it's hard for you, Thor. The eyes he turned on her were full of such unspeakable things that she stopped. She was obliged to wait till he looked away again before she could go on. I know it's hard for you, Thor. It's hard for us all. But my point is that bitterness or violence will only make it worse. You must remember, I feel that I must remind you of it, that you're not the only sufferer. He bowed his head into his hands again, but without the mad anguish of a few minutes earlier. Where so much is intolerable, she pursued, what we have to do, each one of us, is to see how tolerable we can make things for everyone else. He raised his head for one quick reproachful glance. Do you mean tolerable for Claude? Yes, I do mean for Claude. We shan't have to punish him. He gave her another look. Then what have we got to do? Nothing that isn't kind and well thought out beforehand. That's really the important thing. When one can't move without hurting someone, isn't it better not to move at all? It was the old doctrine of tarrying the Lord's leisure against which his instincts were still in revolt. His indignation was such that he could partially turn and place her. Do you mean to say that we should let him abandon her now? She laid her hand on his arm. Oh, Thor, dear, it isn't for us to let or prevent or anything. We can't drive other people, and it's only to a slight degree that we can lead them. Even I know that. What we can do best is to follow and pick up the pieces. He shook his head blankly. I don't understand. What good would that do? She rose, saying quietly, I shall have to let you think it out for yourself. As he remained seated, his forehead resting on his hand, she passed behind him. With her arm thrown lightly across his shoulders, she bent over him till her cheek touched his hair. Thor, dear, she whispered, we've got our own problems to solve, haven't we? We can't solve Claude's and Rosie's too. No one could do that but themselves. Whatever happens, whether he comes back and marries her or whether he doesn't, no help would ever come of your interference, all mine. If we'd only understood that before. You mean if I had? Well, Thor, darling, you haven't. You see, human beings are so terribly free. I say terribly on purpose because you can't compel them to be wise and prudent and safe, even when they're making the most obvious mistakes. We must let them make them and suffer and learn. She bent closer to his ear. And it's what we must do, Thor, dear, you and I. We've made our mistakes already, though perhaps we didn't know it. Now we must have the suffering and the learning. She brushed her lips lightly across his hair and left him. As she walked through the square and passed the terminus of the tram-line and on into the beginning of County Street, she was obliged to keep repeating her own words. Nothing that isn't kind and well thought out beforehand. Having counseled him against bitterness and violence, she saw that her immediate task was not to swallow her own words. Bitterness was beyond suppression and violence would have been so easy. Well thought out beforehand, she emphasised, whatever I do I must keep to that. If I don't, God knows where we shall be. In pursuance of this principle she turned in at her father-in-law's gate. He and Mrs. Masterman must also be warned. Rosie's rash act would touch them so closely that unless they were informed of it gently, something regrettable might be said or done. As to that, however, her fears proved groundless. Masterman himself opened the door for her. She went up the steps. Saw you coming, he explained. Just got out from town. He'd has been telling me the most distressing thing, the most damnedly theatrical, idiotic thing. Perhaps you've heard of it. I know what you mean. I've been there. I was there when they brought her ashore. It may have been idiotic, as you say, but I don't think it was theatrical. You will when you know. You know, he called up the stairs, after they entered the hall. Lois is here. Come down. Mrs. Masterman entered the library a minute later, with both hands outstretched. Oh, my dear, what a comedy this is! It was not often that her manna forsook its ladylike suavity. What a comedy! But, of course, you don't know. Nobody knows, thank God. But we must tell you. She turned to her husband. Will you tell her archie, or shall I? If it's about Claude and Rosie Faye, Lois said when they got seated, I know all that. Four told me. He told me yesterday because, well, because I've been taking an interest in Rosie for some months past. And when I went to see her yesterday afternoon, old Mr. Faye wouldn't let me. He said there'd been trouble or something between Claude and Rosie. He's been so romantic, poor boy, uninterrupted, and so loyal, you'd hardly believe. He's been taken incompletely. He did want to marry her. That's true. There's no use denying it. He told his father and he told me. Oh, you've no idea. We've been so worried. But he must have found her out. Simply found her out. Lois weighed the wisdom of asking questions or of learning more than fortress to tell her. But in the end it seemed reasonable to ask. Found her out? How? Ena threw up a pretty hand. Oh, well, with a girl of that sort, what could you expect? Claude's been completely taken in, though he was. He's so innocent, poor boy. He wouldn't believe, not even when I told him. I tried to stand by him. I really did, didn't I, Archie? When he said he wanted to marry her, I said, I—if she's a good girl, Claude, and loves you, I'll accept her. I really did know this, and you can imagine what it cost me. But I could see it once. Anyone who wasn't infatuated as Claude was would have seen it at dance. I could see it at dance. The girl must be, well, something awful. Lois spoke warmly. Oh, I don't think that. My dear Lois, I know what's more, Thor knows, too. And I must say I can't help blaming Thor. He's backed Claude up and backed him up when all the while he's known what she was. Lois felt obliged to speak. I don't think he's known anything to her discredit. Oh, but I don't think he's known anything to her discredit. Oh, but he has, I assure you he has, and what amazes me about Thor simply amazes me is that she shouldn't see it in the right light. Archie did, as soon as I told him. Didn't you, Archie? And I didn't tell him— Eden ran on exactly— till I saw what a trouble dear Claude was in. When Claude began to see for himself I betrayed his confidence to the extent of telling his father, but not before. You could hardly blame me for that, could you? And when I did tell Archie why he was so plain that a child could have understood. For question what was plain could not but come to Lois' lips, but she succeeded in withholding it. She even rose with signs of going. It was Archie who responded to his wife taking a man's view of that which seemed to her so damning. We must make alarms as, of course, for it's being a cock-and-bull story to begin with, but we never know how to tell the truth. We couldn't treat it as a cock-and-bull story so long as Claude believed it, the mother declared, in defence of her right to be anxious, and Thor believed it too, I know he did, and I do blame Thor for not telling Claude, a boy so inexperienced that a girl couldn't be getting money from some other man and go on getting it after she was married, unless there had been something wrong. Lois felt as if her blood had been arrested at her heart. Money from some other man? Money from some other man, Mrs. Martman repeated firmly. I told Claude at the time that no man in his senses would settle money on a girl like that, unless there had been a reason, and a very good reason too. A very good reason too, I said, but Claude is ignorant of the world as if he was ten years old, he really is. She took him in completely. Being too consciously a gentleman to say more in disparagements to the character they needed to permit it himself already, Masterman remained in the library while his wife accompanied Lois to the door. The latter had said good-bye and was descending the steps when Eda cried out in a tone that was like a confession. Oh, Lois, you don't think that poor girl had any reason to throw herself into the pond, do you? At the foot of the steps Lois turned and looked upward. Eda was wringing her hands, but the daughter-in-law didn't notice it. As a matter of fact, she was deeply sunk into thoughts of her own to have any attention to spare for other people's searching of heart. Having heard the question she could answer it but absently and as though it were a point of no pressing concern. She hadn't the reason you were thinking of. I feel very sure of that. I've asked her mother and she says she knows it. Mrs. Masterman was uttering some expression of relief, but Lois could listen to no more. In her heart there was room for only one consideration. Money. Money. She was saying to herself as she went down the avenue beneath the leafing-elms he was going to give up that. But Eda returned to the threshold of the library where her husband, standing with his back to the empty fireplace, was meditating moodyly. Ah, Archie! She faltered. You do think that girl was any seeking notoriety, don't you? He racially said which had been hanging pensively. Suddenly. Don't you? true? She tried to speak with conviction. Oh, yes, of course! That is how she analysed. She was going in for cheap tragedy, in the hope that the sensation would reach Claude. That was her game, quite evidently. Desi was a put-up job between her and those two young men. It took very good care at any rate to have them alongside. But if Claude should hear of it, I must see that he doesn't. Wiring him to go on to Japan after he's in California. Let him go to India, if he likes, round the world. Anything to keep him away. And you and I, he added, had better hook it till the whole thing blows over. She looked distressed. Hook it, Archie! Close the house up and go abroad. Haven't been abroad for three years now. Little motor-trip through England and back toward the end of the summer. Fortunately, I've sold that confounded property. Good surprise, too. Hobson of Hobson and Davies. Going to bill for residence. Takes it from the expiration of the lease, which is up in July. You'll tear out the whole gang, then, so that by the time we come back, they'll be gone. What do you think? Might do Devonshire and Cornwall. Always wanted to take that trip. A few weeks in Paris before we come home. The suggestion of going abroad came as such a pleasing surprise that Mrs. Masterman slipped into a chair to turn it over in her mind. Then Claude couldn't come back, could he? Expressed the first of the advantages she foresaw. He'd have nowhere to go. Oh, you're not being a hurry to do that! Archie said confidently. And I do want some things, she mused further. I had nothing to wear for the Darling's Ball. Nothing. And you know how long I've worn the dinner-dresses I have. I really couldn't put on the green again. She was silent for some minutes, while another of those queer little cries escaped her, such as had broken from her lips when she stood at the door with Lois. But oh, Archie, I wanted to do what's right. What's right, Archie? He looked at her from under his brows, as his head again drooped moodily. What's what? What's right, Archie? Lately—I don't know—but Lately—she passed her hand across her brow. Sometimes I feel like I get to be afraid, Archie, as if we weren't—as if something were going to happen to overtake us. Crossing the room, he bent back her pretty head and kissed her. Nonsense! he smiled unsteadily. Nerves, dear! Don't wonder at it, with all we've been through, one way or another. That's what we'll do. Close the house up and go abroad for three months. Inconvenient just now with the upset of the business, but we'll do it. Get out of the way. See something new. There, now, old girl! he coaxed, patting her on the shoulder. Brace up and shake it off. Nothing but nerves. He added as he moved back toward his stand by the fireplace. Cut himself! Do you, Archie? Like that, like—like what I said. He had resumed his former attitude, his feet wide apart, his hands behind his back, his head hanging, when he muttered, Liar, the devil. She was not sure how much mental discomfort was indicated by the phrase, so she sat looking at him distressfully. Being unused to grappling with grave questions of right and wrong, she found the process difficult. It was like wandering through morasses, in which she could neither sink nor swim, till she found herself emerging on solid familiar ground again, with a reconciling observation. Well, I do need a few things. End of Chapter 26 It was not till Razor was well enough to go listlessly back to work, and the master-months had sailed, that Lois found her own emotions ripe for speech. During the intervening fortnight, she and Thor had lived their ordinary life together, but on a basis which each knew to be temporary. While he kept his office hours in the mornings, and visited his patients in the afternoons, and she busied herself with household tasks, or superintended the gardener in replanting the faded tulip beds with flocks and sweet peas and daubilars. While she sewed or did embroider in the evenings, and listened to him reading aloud, or, since the nights were growing warm, they sat silent on an upper balcony, or talked about the stars. Each knew that the inattention would never be relaxed till it was broken. If there was any doubt of that, it was on Thor's side. Because she said nothing, there were minutes when he hoped she had nothing to say. Unaware of a woman's capacity for keeping the surface unruffled, while storm may be raging beneath, he beguiled himself at times into thinking that his fears of her acuteness had been false alarms. If so, he could only be thankful. He wanted to forget. If he had had a prayer to put up on the subject, it would have been that she would allow him to forget. So, as day followed day, regularly, peacefully, with an abstention on her part from comment that could give him pain, he began to acknowledge the hope—a hope which he knew in his heart to be baseless—that she had nothing to remember. When he was called on at last to face the realities of the case, the moment was as unexpected to him as it was to her. She had not meant to bring the subject up on that particular evening. She had made no program, not because she was uncertain as to what she ought to say, but because the impulse to say it lagged. In the end it came to her without warning, surprising herself no less than him. Four, were you going to give money to Rosie Faye? The croaking of frogs seemed part of the silence in which she waited for his answer. The warm air was heavy with the sense of lilac, honeysuckle, and syringa. As they stood by the railing of the balcony that connected the exterior of their two rooms, she erected, he leaning outward with an arm stretched towards the sky. A great white lilac, whose roots were in the early days of the Willoughby farm, threw up its tribute of blossoms almost to her feet. The lights of the village being banked under Virgia, the eye sought the stars. Four loved the stars. On Moon's night she spent hours in contemplation of their beckoning mystery. From Origa and Taurus in January he followed them round to Aries and Perseus in December, getting a beam on his inward way. Just now, with the aid of a pencil, he was tracing for his wife's benefit the lines of the rising virgin. Lois could almost discern the graceful, recumbent figure, winged, noble, lying on the eastern horizon, Spiker's sweet, silvery light or tremble in her hand. She was actually thinking how white for a star was Spiker's radiance when the word slipped out. Four, were you going to give money to Rosie Faye? He suppressed the natural question concerning her sources of information in order to say, as quietly as he could, if Claude had married her, I was going to help them out. She resented what she considered his evasiveness. That isn't just what I asked. Even so it tells you what you wanted to know, doesn't it? Not everything I wanted to know. Why should you want to know everything? Because, in Strucker, that her reason could be best expressed by shifting her ground. Thordia, exactly why did you want to marry me? The change in tactics troubled him. I think I told you that at the time. You told me you came to me as a tour, to a shelter. And as to a home? I said that, too, Lois. Yes, she agreed slowly. You said that, too. A brief interval gave emphasis to the succeeding words. But did you think it was enough? I couldn't judge of that. I could only say what I had to say, truthfully. Oh, I know it was truthfully. It's just the trouble. You see, Thor, she went on unsteadily. I thought you were telling me only some of what was in your heart. And it was all. I'm not certain that I know what you mean by all. What I felt was so much. He added reproachfully. It's surely a great deal when a man finds a woman his refuge from trouble. That's perfectly true, Thor, and there's no one in the world who wouldn't be touched by it. But in the case of a wife, she can hardly help thinking of the kind of trouble he's escaping from. But so long as he escapes from it, she interrupts it quickly. Yes, so long as he does, but when he doesn't. When, instead of leaving his trouble outside the refuge, he brings it in. He took an uneasy turn up and down the balcony. Look here, Lois, have you any particular motive in bringing this up now? Yes, Thor. It's the same motive I had a few weeks ago, only that I haven't been sure of it till tonight. I want you—she hesitated, but urged herself on— I want you to let me go away. Go away? he cried sharply. Go away where? I don't know yet. Anywhere. There are one or two visits I might make, or I could find a place. That part of it doesn't matter. But when you wanted to go away a few weeks ago, it was to take her. I shouldn't need to do that now, because she's better. In a way, she's all right. All right. Then it changed. It was to make a show of not being afraid to mention Rosie that he said, changed in what way? Well, you'll see. She decided that for his own sake it was kindness to be cruel, and so added, changed to a healthier frame of mind. She's very much ashamed of what she tried to do and wants to begin again on a less foolish basis. So, she continued, reverting to her former point, my going away wouldn't now have anything to do with her. It would be on my own account. I want to—to think. Think about what? Well, chiefly, about you. He knew they were nearing the heart of the question, and so went up to it boldly. To wonder whether or not I love you, is that it? No, not exactly. She allowed a second to pass before letting slip the words. Rather the other way. The other way, how? She spoke very softly. Whether or not I love you. Oh! His tone was as soft as hers, but with the ejaculation he moved his big hands about his body like a man feeling for his wound. I thought you did. Yes, I thought so too, till—till lately. Perhaps I do even now. I don't know. It's what I wanted to get away for, to—to think, to see. I can't do either when you're so near me. You—you overwhelm me, you crush me. I don't get the free use of my mind. He turned again to pace the narrow limits of the balcony. If you ever did love me, Lois, he said, in a voice which you hardly recognize because of the new thrill in it, I've done nothing to deserve the withdrawal of your affection. She answered, while still keeping her eyes absently on Spiker's white effusions. I know you haven't, Thor, dear. But that's not the point. It's rather that I have to go back and—and revise everything, form new conceptions. He paused, standing behind her. I don't think I get your idea. No, probably not. You couldn't without knowing what it all used to mean to me. Used to mean? Yes, Thor. Used to mean in a way that it doesn't know. I never count any more. There was pain in his voice, as he said. That's hard, Lois. Damnably hard. I know, Thor, dear. I wouldn't say it if I hadn't made up my mind that I must, that I ought to. I've had a great shock, which has been in its way of great humiliation. But I could go on keeping it to myself if I hadn't come to the conclusion that it's best for you to know. Men are so slow to fathom what their wives are thinking of. Well, then tell me. She turned slowly round from her contemplation of the stars, a hand on each side grasping the low rail against which she leaned. The spangles on her scarf over her bare shoulders littered irredistantly in the light streaming from her room. Of thought she could discern little more than the whiteness of his face and of his evening shirt front from the obscurity in which he kept himself. A minute or more elapsed before she went on. You see, Thor, I didn't fall in love with you first of all for your own sake. It was because because I thought you'd fallen in love with me. That's sort of a confession, isn't it? It may be something out to be ashamed of, and perhaps I am a little. But you'd understand how it could happen if you were to realise what it was to me that a man should fall in love with me at all. He tried to interrupt her, but she insisted on going on in her own way. I wasn't attractive. I never have been. During the years when I was going out I never received what people called attentions, not from anyone. I don't say that I didn't suffer on a kind of it, I did, but I'd begun to take the suffering philosophically. I'd made up my mind that no one would ever care for me. And I was getting used to the idea when—when you came. Because I voice trembled, she pressed her handkerchief against her lips, while Thor stood silent in the darkness of the far end of the balcony. When you did come, Thor, dearly, couldn't but seem to me the most amazing thing that ever happened. I didn't allow myself to think that you were in love with me. I didn't dare, at first. It made me happy that you should think it worthwhile just to come and see me, to talk to me, to tell me some of the things you hoped to do. That in itself. She broke off again, losing something of her self-command. In the stress of physical agitation she drew the spangled scarf over her shoulders and stepped forward into the shaft of light that fell through the open French window of her room. But finally, Thor, I came to the conclusion that you must love me. I couldn't explain your kindness in any other way. Believe me, I didn't accept that way till did it seem the only one. When I did, well, it wasn't merely pride and happiness, I felt it was something more. A sob in her throat obliged her to interrupt herself again while the croaking of frogs continued. And so, Thor, dear, love came to me too. It came because I thought you brought it. But now that I see you didn't bring it, you can understand why I should be in doubt as to whether or not it really did come. Since he recognised the futility of making an immediate response, they stood confronting each other in silence. She took another step nearer him. But what I'm not in any doubt about at all is the scorn I feel for myself for ever having cherished the delusion. If I've been a woman with more claim, let us say, to being love— Lois, for God's sake, don't say that. But I must say it, Thor. It's at the bottom of all I mean. I was weak and foolish enough to think that in spite of the things I liked, a man had given me his heart when he hadn't. Lois, I can't stand this. Please don't go on. But I have to stand it, Thor. I have to stand it day and night, without ever getting away from the thought of it. I have to go back and puzzle and wonder and speculate as to why you did what you've done to me. I see things this way, Thor. There was a time when you thought you might come to care for me. You really thought it. And then something happened, and you were not so sure. Later you felt that you couldn't, that you never would. But the something that happened happened the wrong way for you, and Papa broke down as he did, and I was in the danger of being poor, and you were kind and generous, and you weren't very happy of things were. You told me so, didn't you? And in short, you thought you might as well. You knew I expected it, or had expected it once, and so you did it. Tell me, Thor, dear, am I so very far wrong? Wasn't it like that? He raised his head defiantly. And if I admitted that it was like that, what then? Oh, nothing, I should merely ask you the same thing to let me go away. Away for how long, she reflected, till I could establish a new basis on which to come back. I don't know what you mean by a new basis. I dare say I don't mean anything very different from the compromise most people have to make a little while after marriage, only that in my case the necessity comes more as a shock. You see, Thor, you're not the man. Not the man I thought you were. I must have a little while to get used to that. He stirred uneasily. You find I'm not so good a man. Oh, I don't say that. I don't say that at all. You're just as good, only you're not— She went up to him, laying her hands on his shoulders. Oh, you don't understand. I love the other Thor. I'm not sure that I love this one. I don't know. Perhaps I do. I can't tell till I get away from you. Let me go. It may not be for long. She stepped back from him toward the window of her room, through which she seemed about to pass. He was obliged to speak in order to retain her. Look here, Lois. He began, not knowing exactly how he meant to continue. She turned with a foot on the threshold, her hand on the knob of the open window door. The pose, set off by the simplicity of the old black evening dress she was in the habit of wearing when they were alone, displayed the commanding beauty of her figure to a degree which she had never observed before. He remembered afterwards that something shot through him, something he had associated to the two, only with memories of little Rosie Faye. But for a minute, he was too intensely preoccupied for more than a subconscious attention. She was waiting, and he must say something to justify his appeal to her. It's all right, were the words he found. I'm willing. That is, I'm willing in principle, only— He stammered on. Anyhow, I don't want you to go roaming the country by yourself. Why not let me go? I could go away for a while, and you could stay here. He warmed the idea as soon as he began to express it. This is your home, rather than mine. It's your father's house. You've lived in it for years. I couldn't stay here without you, while you're used to it without me. I'll go. I'll go, and not come back till you tell me. There. Will that do?" The advantages of the arrangement were evident. She answered slowly. It—it might. But what about your patience? Oh, Hill would look after them. He said he would if I wanted to attend the medical congress at Minneapolis. I told him I didn't. But—but— He tapped the rail to emphasise the timeliness of the idea. But by George, I'll do it. You'd have three weeks at least, and as many more as you asked for. She gave the suggestion a minute's thought. Very well thought. Since the congress is going on and your time wouldn't be altogether thrown away, you see, all I wanted was a little quiet, a little solitude, perhaps, just to realise where I am and to see how to begin again, if we ever can. She closed one side of the window, softly and slowly. Her hands wound the other baton when he uttered a little throaty cry. Aren't you going to say good night? Standing on the low step of the window, she was sufficiently above him to be able to fold his head in her arms, to pillow it on her breast, while she imprinted a long kiss on the thick, dark mass of his hair. Having released him, she withdrew, closing the window gently and pulling down the blinds. Outside of the darkness, thought turned once more to where the virgin, recumbent, noble, outclined and crowned with stars, spiked the wheat ear and had the hand hanging by her side, rose slowly toward mid-heaven. Irrelevantly, they came back to his memory something said months before by his Uncle Sim, but which he had not recalled since the night he heard it. You may make an awful fool of yourself, Thor, but you'll be on the side of the angels, and the angels will be on yours. He's naughty to himself. That's all very fine. But where are the angels? And again he sought the stars. End of Chapter 27 It was Jim Breen who told Lace that Jasper Faye's tenancy of the land north of the pond was definitely ended. What a nice fern tree, Mrs. Masterman, he'd ask briskly. Two or three beauties for so that Mr. Faye's place looked dandy in the corner of a big room, beat palms and rubber plants like a rose will beat a bit of a nice cheap one, Mr. Faye's. Lace wondered, is Mr. Faye's setting off? Well, not exactly. Father's setting what he don't want to cart over to our place. Didn't you know? Father's bought out Mr. Faye's stock. Mr. Faye's got to beat it by July 9th. As Lace looked into the honest face, she made the reflection with a little jealous pang that Rosie Faye was just the type that men like Jim Breen fell in love with. There was something in men like Jim Breen, in men like Thor Masterman, the big, generous, tender men that impelled them toward piteous little creatures like Rosie Faye, driven probably by the protective yearning in themselves. It placed the tall women, the strong women, the women whose first impulse was to give to others, rather than to get anything for themselves, at a disadvantage. In response to the information just received, she said anxiously, Why, Jim, tell me about it. He drew from the wagon a wooden flat filled with zinnier plantlings, like so many little green rosettes. Had Libby Hobbs known that property in our Mrs. Masterman, he said cheerily, depositing the flat on the ground. Going to build, didn't you know? He would, and he placed there, had architects and landscape gardeners prying round for the last two weeks, and old man Faye would allow one of them on the grounds. He would die laughing to see him chasing them on off with a spade or a rake, or whatever he has in his hand. His property due to July 9th, he says, and he wouldn't let so much as a crow fly over it if it belonged to Hadley B. Hobson. He would die laughing. I don't see how you can laugh when he's in such trouble, poor man. Oh, well, Jim drawled optimistically. He won't do so bad. He can always have a job with Father. Father's mingled with him ever since the two of them are young. If Mr. Faye hadn't been so moon-struck, he'd have had just the same chance as Father had. Lois chose a moment which seemed to be discreet, in order to say, I know Rosie quite well. I've seen a good deal of her during the past few months. Rosie's all right, Mrs. Masterman. Jim answered, suddenly, and a trifle aggressively. I don't care what anyone says. She's all right. I know she's all right, Jim. She's one of the most remarkable characters I've ever met. How often was she to let me help her more? Well, you hold on to her, Mrs. Masterman. He advised, with a curious, peeping quality in his voice. You'll find she'll be worth it. And if her girl was up against it, she is. I will hold on to her, Jim. It's all right what people are saying, that she'd gone menincally because she took that fool, jumped into the pond. I know how she did it. She'd get to the point where she couldn't help it, where she just couldn't stand any more. With the business all gone to pieces, a mat coming out of jail, and everything else. Who wouldn't have done it? I'd have done it myself if I'd been a girl. She got worked up, Mrs. Masterman, and when girls get worked up, wow, they do anything. I believe the shock's done her good. Sort of clear her mind like. Let's try to be tactful. Then you see her. Well, on and off. He grew peeping and confidential. I don't mind telling you, Mrs. Masterman. He began, as if acknowledging any discretion. I went with Rosie once. Went with her for over a year. Did you, Jim? He leaned nonchalantly against Maud's barrel-shaped body, his face taking on an expression of boyish regret. And I'd have gone on going with her if Rosie hadn't kind of dropped me. Oh, but, Jim, why should she? Well, I can understand it. Rosie's high-toned, you know, Mrs. Masterman, and she's got a magnificent education. I guess you wouldn't come across them more refined, not in the most tip-top families. Pretty. My Lord, pretty isn't the word for it. And I think she grows prettier. And work! Why, Mrs. Masterman, if that girl was at the head of a plant like ours, there wouldn't be anything for Father and me to do, but sit in a chair and rock. I'm glad she's willing to see you, Lois Ventured. He sprang to his seat behind Maud. Well, I guess she needs all the friends she's got. Lois Ventured's still further. I'm sure she needs friends like you, Jim. There was a flare in his eyes, he fumbled for the reins. While she's only got a stoop and picked me up, get along, Maud, gee. In obedience to his pull, Maud arched her heavy neck and executed a sideways movement uncertainly. She knows I'm there, he continued, as the wagon creaked around, being there ever since she dropped me. Gee, Maud, gee, what are you thinking of? I've never gone with any one else, Mrs. Masterman. Not really gone with them. Rose has been the only one so far. Well, good-bye, and you will hold on to her, Mrs. Masterman, I won't you? Indeed, I will, Jim, and you must do the same. He threw her a roofful look over his shoulder as Maud paced toward the gate. Oh, I'm on the job every time. The visit gave her a number of themes for thought, of which the most insistent was the power some women had of drawing out the love of men. For the rest of the day her gardening became no more than a mechanical directing of the setting out of seedlings, while she meditated on the problem of attractiveness. How was it that women of small endowments could captivate men at sight, and that others of inexhaustible potentialities—she was not afraid to rank herself among them—went unrecognized and undesired? If Rosy Faye had been content with the honours of a local bell, she could have had her choice among half the young men in the village. What was her gift? What was the gift of that great sisterhood, comprising perhaps a third of the women in the world, to whom the majority of men turned instinctively, ignoring or partially ignoring the rest? Was it mere sheepstupidity of men themselves that sent one where the others went, without capacity for individual discernment? Or was there a secret call that women like Rosy Faye could give, which brought them too much of that for which other women were left famishing? She put the question that evening to Dr. Sim Masterman, who had dropped in to see her, as he not infrequently did after his supper, now that Thor was away. Indeed, his visits were so regular as to make her afraid that with his curious social or spiritual second sight he suspected more in Thor's absence than zeal for the science of medicine. Why do men fall in love with inferior women, become infatuated with them? He answered, while sprawling before the library fire, his long legs apart, his fingers interlocked over his old town waistcoat. No use to disgust love with a woman, she can't get hold of it by the right end. Oh, but I thought that was just what she could do, one of the few capabilities universally conceded her. All wrong, my dear, a man occasionally understands love, but a woman never, oh so rarely that it hardly counts, gets it backward, wrong end first, nine women out of ten. She looked out from her saying, I do wish you'd tell me what you mean by that. Clear enough, love is in the first place the instinct to love someone else, and only in the second place the desire to be loved in return. Ten to one the woman puts the cart before the horse, she's thinking of the return before she's done anything to get it. She don't want to love half as much as to be loved, and so she finds herself left. Lois went on with her saying again, but she was uneasy. She thought of her confession to Thor, could it be that there was something wrong with her love as well as with his? It was to see what he had to say further that she asked. He finds herself left in what way? Make himself too sentimental, he grumbled on, in love with love. They liked that expression, it doesn't harm. Set some to wall-gathering with the heart. Make some think love more important than it is. It's generally supposed to be rather important, rather as the word, but it's not the only thing of which that can be said, and more. Women reason as if it was. Make their lives depend on it. Mistake. If you can get it, well and good. If not, there's compensation. She lifted her head not less in amazement than in indignation. Compensation for having to do without love? Heaps. And may I ask what? Oh, no, he was telling you wouldn't believe me. Be like telling a man who's fond of his wine that he'd be just as well off with water. She said musingly, Yes, love is the wine of life, isn't it? Wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and can also play the juice with it. She sat for some time smiling to herself with faint amusement. Do you really disapprove of love, Uncle Sim? She asked at last. He yawned loudly and stretched himself. What'll be the good of that? Don't disapprove of it any more than I disapprove of the circulation of the blood. Force in life, of course. Treasure to be valued and peril to be controlled. The play with it requires skill. To utilize it calls for wisdom. She had again been smiling gently to herself when she said, I doubt if you can ever have been in love. Got nothing to do with it. Not obliged to have been insane to understand insanity. Matter of fact, best brain specialists have always kept their senses. Oh, then you rate love with insanity. Ah, depends on the kind. Some sort's not far from it. Obsession. Brainstorm. Supernormal excitement. Passing commotion of the senses. Comes as suddenly as a summer tempest. Thunder and lightning and rain, and goes the same way. Oh, but would you call that love? You bet I'd call it love. Love of the poets, right about. Grand passion. Worlds along like a tornado. Makes a noise and kicks up dust all over in an afternoon. That's the real thing. If you can't love like that, you can't love at all. Not in the grand manner. The going just as vital as the coming. Very essence of it that it shouldn't last. That's why Shakespeare kills his Romeo and his Juliet at the end of the play, and Wagner his Tristan and his at old. Nothing else to do with them. People of that kind go through just the same set of hijinks six or eight months later with someone else. And in poetry that wouldn't do. Romantic lovers love by crises and never pass twice the same way. People who don't do that, and lots of them don't, needn't think they can be romantic. They ain't. But surely there is a love. Of the nice tame housekeeping variety, of course. And it bears the same relation to the other kind as a glass of milk to a bottle of champagne. Mind you, I like milk. I approve of it. In the long run it'll beat champagne any day. Especially where you expect babies. I'm only saying that it doesn't come with the same vintage as Verve Clicquot. Women offer me shit did, and when it doesn't they make things uncomfortable. No use. Can't make a Tristan out of good, honest, faithful, Willem Dobbin know-how. The thing with the fizz is bad to go flat, and the thing that stands by you to be riled light on all through life won't have any fizz. Feeling at liberty to reject these vaporings as those of an eccentric old man who could know little or nothing on the subject, Lo is reverted to the aspect of the question which had been in her mind when she started the theme. You still haven't answered what I asked, as to why men fall in love with inferior women, and often with a kind of infatuation they hardly ever feel for the good ones. It took longer than usual to reflect. Part of man's dual nature. Paul knew a good thing about that. Puts the new man in contrast to the old man, the inner man in contrast to the outer man, the spiritual man in contrast to the carnal. The old outer carnal man falls in love with one kind of person, and the new inner spiritual man with another. Depends on which element is the stronger. The higher falls in love with the higher type, the lower with the lower. But suppose, neither is stronger than the other, that they're equally balanced and in conflict. One of the commonest sights in life. Known fellows in love with two women at the same time, with a good wife at home, mother of the children or all that, and another kind of woman somewhere else. True in a way to unboth. Struggle of the two natures. Lo is was distressed. Oh, but that kind of thing can't be love. Can't be? It is. Ask any one who's ever felt it, who's been dragged by it both ways at once. He'll tell you whether it's love or not, and each kind the real thing, while it lasts. It was the expression, while it lasts, that Lo is most resented. Introduce love to a phase, to a passing experience that might be repeated on an indefinite number of occasions. It was more than a depreciation. It had the nature of a sacrilege. And yet, no later than the following day, she received a shock that showed her there was something to be said in its favour. She had gone nominally to see Rosie, but really to verify for herself Jim Breen's report of the collapse of Jasper Faye's little industry. She found it hard to believe that after Claude's conduct toward Rosie, her father-in-law could have the heart to bring further work upon a family that had already had enough. Nothing but seeing for herself could curse her incredulity. She had seen for herself. Over the little place which had always been neat, even when it was full on, there was now the stamp of desolation. The beds which had been seeded or planted a month before, and which should now have been weeded, trimmed, and hoed, were growing with an untended recklessness that had all the proverbial resemblance to moral breakdown. In the Cucumber-house the vines have become rusty and limp, sagging from the trines on which they climbed in debauched indifference to sightliness. The roof of the hot house that had contained the flowers had a deep gash in the glass which it was no longer worthwhile to mend. There was no yellow-brown plume from the furnished chimney, and the very windows of the old house with the mansard roof had in their stair the glazed, unseeing expression of eyes in which there is death. Inside Mrs. Faye was packing up. Battered old trunks that had long been stored in some mouldy hiding-place stood agape. A packing-case held the place of honour in a forbidden best room into which Lois had never looked before. Mrs. Faye had little to say. Tears whirled into her cold eyes with the attempt to say anything. Outside Faye himself had nothing to say at all. Lois had accosted him, and though he had ceased to regard her as an enemy, he stood grimly silent as his end in response to her words of consolation. I know things will come all right again, Mr. Faye. They must. They look dark now, but haven't you often noticed that after the worst times in our lives we were able to look back and see that the very thing that seemed most cruel was the turning point at which a change for the better began? You must surely have noticed that. A man with so much experience as you? He looked vaguely about him, standing in patience, till she had set her say, but giving no indication that her words had anything to do with him. The change in his appearance shocked her. Everything in his face had taken on what was to her a terrible significance. The starry mysticism had vanished from the eyes, to be replaced by a look that was at once hunted and searching, vindictive, and yet were begone. The mouth was sunken as the mouths of old men become from the loss of teeth, and the thin lips which used to be kindly and vacillating were drawn with a hard, unflinching tightness. The skin that had long been gray was now ghostly, with the shadowy, not quite earthly, hue of things about to disappear. She talked to him for some minutes before he woke to animation. At sight of two young men, surveyors Clarks, perhaps, who had set up in the roadway what might have been a camera on a tripod, or more probably a theodolite, through which they were squinting over the buildings and the slope of the land. He left her abruptly. With a hoe in his hand he crept forward, taking his place behind a clump of syringa that grew near the gate, rage of strike if either the lads ventured to put foot on his property. It was the situation at which, according to light-hearted Jim Breen, he would have died laughing, but Lois had difficulty in keeping back her tears. She found Rosie in the hot-house of which the interior corresponded to the gash in the roof. All the smaller plants had been removed, disclosing the empty, ugly, earth-stained, water-stained wooden stagings. Only some half-dozen fern-trees remained of all the former beauty. But even here Rosie was at work, sitting at the old desk, which, deprived of its sheltering greenery, was shabbier than ever, making out bills. There was still money owing to her father, and it was important that it should be collected. Over and over again, she wrote her neat account rendered, while she added as a postscript in every case, Please remit, going out of business. And yet, if there was anything on the dilapidated premises that could cheer or encourage, it was Rosie. With the enforced rest and seclusion following on her fruitless dash to escape, her prettiness had become more delicate, less worn. Shame at her folly had put into her greenish eyes a pleading timidity, which became a quivering, babyish tremble when it reached the lips. The contrast which the girl thus presented to her parents, as well as something that was visibly developing within her, enabled Lois to affirm that which of the two she had only hoped or suspected, that the wild leap into the pond had worked some mysterious good. Like her father and mother, Rosie had little to say. The meeting was embarrassing. There were too many unuttered and unutterable thoughts on both sides to make intercourse easy or agreeable. All they could achieve was to be sorry for each other, in a measure to respect each other, and to make up by an enforced, slightly perfunctory goodwill for what they lacked in the way of spontaneity. Lois took the chair on which Rosie had been seated at the desk, while Rosie leaned against a corner of the empty staging. It furnished the latter with something to say to be able to tell the new plans of the family. Her father had taken a job with Mr. Breen. It wouldn't be like managing his own place, but it would be better than nothing. He had also rented a tenement in a three-family house on the Thorli estate, to which they would move as soon as possible. It was important to make the change so as to be settled when Matt came out of jail. Both Rosie and her mother were glad that he wouldn't be freed till the 10th of July, because the lease terminated on the 9th. He would return, therefore, to absolutely new conditions, and there would be no necessity of going over any of the old ground again. As far as they were concerned, Rosie and her mother, the sooner they went, the better they would like it, since they had to go. But poor father, Rosie said with a catch in her voice, won't leave till the last minute has struck. Even then, she added, I think they'll have to drive him off. This place has been his life. I don't think he'll last long after he's had to leave it. Having given sympathetic views on these points as they came up, Lois rose to depart. She had actually shaken hands and turned away, when Rosie seemed to utter a little cry. That is, her words came out with the emotion of a cry. Mrs. Masterman, I want to ask you something. Lois turned in surprise. Yes, Rosie, what? With one hand Rosie clung to the staging for support. The back of the other hand was pressed against her lips. She could hardly speak. Is Claude staying away on my account? Before Lois could answer, Rosie added, because he needed it. Lois wondered, what do you mean by that, Rosie? Only that he needed it. I don't care whether he stays away or not. Lois took a step back toward the girl. You mean that it doesn't make any difference to you what he does? She shook her head. No, not any more. That is, you've given him up. Rosie sought for an explanation. I haven't given him up. I only see. You see what, Rosie? Oh, I don't know. It's like having had a dream, a strange, awful dream, and waking from it. Waking from it? Rosie nodded. She made her further efforts to explain. After I did what I did that day at Duck Rock, everything was different. I can't describe it. It was like dying and coming back. It was like waking. Do you mean that what happened before seemed unreal? She nodded again. Yes, that's it. It was like a play. But she corrected herself quickly. No, it wasn't like a play. It was more than that. It was like a dream, an awful dream, but a dream you like, a dream you'd go through again. No, you wouldn't go through it again. It would kill you. She grew incoherent. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. It's gone, just gone. I don't say it wasn't real. It was real. It was a kind of frenzy. It got hold of me body and soul. I couldn't think of anything else while it lasted. Lose was pained. But oh Rosie, love can't come and go like that. Can't it? And it wasn't love. But she contradicted herself again. Yes, it was love. It was love while it lasted. While it lasted. While it lasted. The phrase seemed to be on everyone's lips. There was a stress in Lose's voice as she said. But if it was love, Rosie, it ought to have lasted. And Rosie seemed to agree with her. Yes, it ought to have, but it didn't. It went away. No, it didn't go away. It just, it just wasn't. She wrung her hand struggling with the difficulties she found in explaining herself. After that day at Duck Rock, it was like, it was like the breaking of a spell that was on me. Everything was different. It was like seeing through plain daylight again after looking through colored glass. I didn't want the things I'd been wanting. They were foolish to me. I saw they were foolish and and impossible. But it wasn't as if they had died. It was if I had had and come back. It was on behalf of love that Lose felt driven to make a protest. And yet, Rosie, if you were to see Claude again— No, no, no, the girl cried excitedly. I don't want to see him. He didn't stay away, not on my account, but I can't see him if I can help it. It would be like dying the second time. All the same, he didn't be afraid of me, and his family didn't be afraid of me. I want to, I want to forget them all. Enlightenment came slated to Lose because of her unwillingness to be convinced of the heart's capriciousness. That love could be likened to brainstorm, obsession, the tornado whose rage dies out in an afternoon, was a wound to her tenderest beliefs. That the natural man must be taken into consideration as well as the spiritual, also advanced to what she would have liked to make a serene, smooth theory of life. She stood looking long at the girl, studying her subconsciously, before she was able to say calmly, Very well, Rosie dear, I'll let Claude know. I can get his address and I'll write to him. But another surprise was in store for her. She was near the door leading from the hot house when she became aware that Rosie was behind her and heard the same little gasping cries before. Mrs. Mustman, I want to ask you something. Lose had hardly looked round when the girl went on again. You know Father and Mother. They think the world of you, Mother especially. Do you suppose they'd mind very much if I—if I turned? Lose was puzzled. If you did what, Rosie? If I turned? If I turned Catholic? Oh! The reformed tradition was strong in Lose. She was prepared to defend it by argument and with affection. For a minute she was almost on the point of stating the historical Protestant position when she was deterred by the thought of Dr. Sim. What would he have said to Rosie? She remembered suddenly something that he once did say. If you can seize any one aspect of the Christian religion, do it, for the least of them all will save you. Remembering this, Lose withheld her arguments, asking the non-committal question. Why should you think of doing that? Rosie flushed. Oh! I don't know. I've been— She hung her head. I've been pretty bad, you know. I've told lies and I—I tried to kill myself and everything. And you think you could get more help that way than any other? Oh! I don't know. I went twice lately, not here and in town. It frightened me. I liked it. Had Lose dared, she would have asked if Jim Breen had inspired this sudden change. But she said merely— Oh! I don't believe your father or mother would feel badly in the end. Not if it brought comfort to you, Rosie dear. Is it that you want me to talk to them, to help you out? Rosie nodded silently, and with face averted and a kind of shame. Very well, then, I will. She voted due to her own convictions to add, Perhaps I can do it all the better because— because my personal opinions are the other way. They'll see I'm only seeking whatever may make for your happiness. There was silence for a few seconds before she said, in conclusion, I know, Rosie dear, I do hope you'll be happy, after all, all that's been so hard for you. Rosie was too strong and self-contained to cry, but there was a mist in her eyes as they shook hands again and parted. That night Lose wrote to her husband, You ask me, my dear Thor, if I see my way yet, and frankly I can't say that I do. I begin, however, to wonder if there's not a reason for my remaining puzzled and so long in the dark. I begin to ask if I know what love is, if anybody knows what it is. Do you? If so, what is it? Is it the same thing for everyone, or does it differ with individuals? Is it a temporary thing, or a permanent thing, or does it matter? Is it one of the highest promptings we have, or one of the lowest? Or is it that primary impasse of animate nature which, when developed and perfected, leads to God? Is there a spiritual man and a carnal man, each with a love that can conflict with the love of the other? Is the one man on the side of the angels, as Uncle Sim would say, and the other man on that of the flesh, till the stronger gains the victory? Or is there something in love of the nature of obsession? Does it come and go like the tornadoes, violent in its passage, but as quickly parsed? For, darling, I begin to be afraid of love. If we are to start again, I want it to be on some other ground, a new ground, a ground we don't know anything about as yet. But which, perhaps, we shall discover? End of Chapter 28 Falling Masterman pondered on the words Dose had written him, as he tramped along the bluffs above the Mississippi, with the tires and spars of Minneapolis looming like battlements through the haze of an afternoon at the end of June. He had left the conference on new methods of treating the thyroid gland, which was being held in St. Paul, in order to think his position out. Having moted over from his hotel in Minneapolis, he preferred to tramp it back. The glorious wooded way on the St. Paul side of the river was in itself an invitation to his strong, striding limbs, while the wine of western air and the stimulus of western energy quickened the savage outdoor impulse so ready to leap in his blood. The song of mating birds quickened it too, and the romance of the river gliding through the gorge below, and the beauty of the cities eyeing each other like embattled queens from headland across to headland, and through the splendor of the promise of a golden purple sunset. It was a great setting for great thoughts, inspiring ideas so large that when he reached his hotel he found them too big to reduce easily to paper. He asked me what love is, and said you don't know. I'm more daring than you in that I think I do know. I know two or three things about it, even if I don't know them all. For one thing I know that no one can do more than say what love is for himself. You can't say what it is for me, or isn't, or must be, or ought to be. That's my secret. I can't always share it, or at any rate share it all, even with the person I love. But neither can I say what it is, or isn't, or should be, or must be, for you. You have your secret. Know two people love in the same way, or get precisely the same kind of joy or sorrow from loving. Since love is the flower of personality, it has the same infinite variety that personalities possess. We give one thing, and we get back another. Do not some of our irritations—I'm not speaking of you and me in particular—arise from the fact that, giving one thing, we expect to get the same thing back, when all the while no one else has that special quality to offer. The flower is different according to the plant that produces it. When the pine tree loved the palm, there was more than the distance to make the one a mystery to the other. Of the two things essential to love, the first, so it seems to me, is that what one gives should be one's best—the very blossom of one's soul. It may have the hot luxuriance of the hibiscus, or the flame of the wild azalea in the woods, or no more than the mildly scented, flowerless bloom of the elm, or the linden that falls like manor in the roadway. Each has its beauties and its limitations, but it is worth noting that each serves its purpose in life's infinite profusion, as nothing else could serve it to that particular end. The elm lends something to the hibiscus—the hibiscus to the elm—neither can expect back what it gives to the other. Perfection is accomplished when each offers what it can. Which brings me to the remaining thing I know about love—that it exists in offering. Love is the desire to go outwards, to pour forth, to express, to do, to contribute. It has no system of calculation and no yardstick for the little more or the little less. It is spontaneous and irrepressible and overflowing, and loses the extraordinary essence that makes it truly love when it weighs and measures and inspects too closely the quality of its return. It is in the fact that love is its own sufficiency, its own joy, its own compensation for all its pain, that I find it divine. The one point on which I can fully accept your Christian theology is that your God is love. Given a God who is love, and a love that is God, I can see him as worthy to be worshipped. Call him, then, by any name you please. Jehovah, Allah, Krishna, Christ. You still have the essence—the thing. Love to be love must feel itself infinite, or as nearly infinite as anything a human can be. When I can't pour it out in that way, when I pause to reflect how far I can go, or reach a point beyond which I see that I cannot go any further, I do not truly love. Having written this much, he laid down his pen and considered. He had said nothing personal unless it was by implication. It was only after long meditation that he decided to leave the matter there. The prime question was no longer as to whether or not he loved her, but whether or not she loved him. That was for her to decide. It was for her to decide without his urging or tormenting. He began to feel not only too sensitive on the subject, but too proud to make appeals to which she would probably listen out of generosity. Since he had been in the wrong, it was for her to make the advances. And so he ended his letter and posted it. The discussion continued throughout the correspondence that ensued, while he migrated from Minneapolis to Milwaukee, from Milwaukee to Denver, and from Denver to Colorado Springs. It was partly from curiosity of travel that he zig-dagged in this way across the country, and partly to make it plain to Lois without saying it that he waited her permission to come home. That he should be obliged to return one day without her permission, if not with it, was a matter of course, but to make the meeting easier if she summoned him. As a hint that she could do so and have no fear, he asked her in a post-script to one of his letters to tell him, when she next wrote, what was happening to Rosie Faye. To this she replied as simply and straightforwardly as he had put the question, imparting all that Jim Breen had told her, and whatever she had leaned for herself. Adding as a seeming afterthought in the letter she wrote next day, if Rosie could bring herself to marry Jim, it would be the happiest of all solutions, and make things easier for Claude. I think she will. If so, it won't be so much because her heart would be in court in the rebound, as that the poor little thing is mentally and emotionally exhausted, and glad to creep into the arms of any strong good man who will love her and take care of her. Just to be able to do that much would be enough for Jim. I see a good deal of him, so I know. Every time he brings an order of new plants, we have a little talk, always about Rosie. His love is of the kind you wrote about the other day. It has no yardstick for the little more or the little less in the return. Perhaps men can love like that more easily than women do. Uncle Sim seemed to hint one evening that there is generally a selfish strain in a woman's love, in that what it gets is more precious to it than what it gives. I wonder, for received these two letters together on returning to Colorado Springs from a day's visit to that high wilderness in which John Hay sought freedom from interruption in writing his Life of Lincoln. He understood fully that Lois was deliberately being cruel in order to be kind. The very spacing out of our information over two separate days was meant to impress him, and at the same time to spare. Things would be easier for Claude, she said, when she meant that they would be easier for him. But for him it was a matter of indifference—that is, it was the same kind of matter of indifference that pain becomes in a limb that has grown benumbed. For reasons he could hardly explain, that part of his being to which Rosie Faye made a pathetic appeal couldn't feel any more. It was like something atrophied from over strain. There was the impulse to suffer, but no suffering. Moreover, he was sure that, though these nerves might one day vibrate again, they could never do so otherwise than reminiscently. To the episode he felt as a mother might feel, to the dead charge he's never been able to acknowledge as her own. It was something buried and yet sacred—sacred, despite the fact that it never should have been. As an incident in his life it had bought keen joy and keen a pain, but he had already outlived both. He had outlived them as apparently Rosie had outlived them herself, not by the passage of time, but by an intensively experience which seemed to have covered years. He came to this conclusion not instinctively, not or at once, but by dint of reflection, as he sat on the broad terrace of the hotel, watching the transformation scene that takes place in the Rockies during the half hour before sunset. His pipe was in his mouth, lest his letters lay open on the little table he had drawn up beside his chair. Other tourists bore him company, scattered singly or in groups, smoking and drinking tea. A mild suggestion of Europe, a suggestion of Capmata or of Can, was blocked by the domes of the great range, and by the shifting interplay of magic lights where his eye was impelled to look for the broad still levels of Mediterranean blue. There was a wonder in the moment which the yearning in his spirit was tempted to take a symbolic, and perhaps prophetic, of his future. Where all day long he had seen nothing but hard ridges packed against one another, without water, without snow, without perspective, without a shred of mist, without a hint of mystery, without anything to set the mind to wondering what was above them or beyond them, the dissolving views of late afternoon began to throw up a succession of lovely ranges pierced by valleys, clens, and gorges. Where the eye had ached with its harsh red of the rocks spread with the harsh green of the scant vegetation, soft vapours rose insensibly, purple, pink, and orange, changing into nameless hues as they climbed into the great clefts, and veiled the rolling domes, and swaved the pinnacles and furrowed the deep passes, and put the horizon infinitely far away. The transmutation from conditions in which nature herself seemed for once to be barbaric, alien, hostile to civilized man, painted with Cheyenne war-paint and girdled with a belt of scalps, to this breaking up of glory into glory, of colour into colour, and of form into form, rising, mingling, melting, fading, rising and mingling again, melting again, fading again, passing swiftly in a last brief recredescence from the gold into green, and from green into black, with the hurried eclipse and the sudden tranquility of night, the transmutation which produced all this was to thaw hopeful and in its way in spiriting. In the last rays of light he drew out his fountain pen and the scribbling book he kept for notes by the way, writing quickly without preamble or formality. Thanks for telling me about Rosie. It is as it should be, as will be best. Jim saved her. Nothing is so good could ever happen to her as to marry him. As for me there are two things, Lois, that I can truthfully affirm. I can declare them the more emphatically because I've had time to think them over, to think you over, and myself. If I ever had a doubt about them, I haven't now, because leisure and solitude have enabled me to see them clearly. The first is that I have given you my best, and the second that I've given it without any restriction of what I have been aware. If there was anything I would have held from you in which you think you should have had, I could only say that it was not of the nature of my best. What it was I make no attempt to say, nor would it do any good to try. Whatever it was I wished neither to deprecate it nor to deny it. It was something that swept me, like the tornado which one of your letters speaks, but it passed. It passed leaving me tired and older, very much older, and with an intense desire to creep home. As a physicist I know nothing of a carnal man and a spiritual man, so that I cannot enter into your analysis. But I do know that there are higher and lower promptings in the human heart, and that in my case the higher turned to you. As compared with you, I'm only as the ship compared to the haven in which you would take refuge. The ship is good for something, but it needs a port. Again he decided to leave his appeal suspended here, and on the next morning began his preparations for gradually turning homeward. End of Chapter 29