e for the
first time.

"I can't dance," he told her; "my eyes are bad, and things seem to
whirl."

"If you'll talk," she said, "I'll sit at your feet and listen."

She did it literally, perched on a small gold stool.

"Tell me about your book," she said, looking up at him. "Anne Warfield
says that you wrote it at Bower's."

"I wrote it because she helped me to write it. But she did more for me
than that." His eyes were following the shining figure.

"What did she do?"

"She gave me a soul. She taught me that there was something in me that
was not--the flesh and the--devil."

The girl on the footstool understood. "She believes in things, and makes
you believe."

"Yes."

"I hated to have her come," Marie-Louise confessed, "and now I should
hate to have her go away. She calls herself a country mouse, and I am
showing her the sights--we go to corking places--on pilgrimages. We went
to Grant's tomb, and she made me carry a wreath. And we ride in the
subway and drink hot chocolate in drug stores.

"She says I haven't learned the big lessons of democracy," Marie-Louise
pursued, "that I've looked out over the world, but that I have never been
a part of it. That I've sat on a tower in a garden and have peered
through a telescope."

She told him of the play that she had written, and of the verses that she
had read to the piping Pan.

Later she pointed out Pan to him from the window of the big drawing-room.
The snow had melted in the last mild days, and there was an icicle on his
nose, and the sun from across the river reddened his cheeks.

"And there, everlastingly, he makes music," Geoffrey said, "'on the reed
which he tore from the river.'"

"'Yes, half a beast is the great god, Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man.
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,
For the reed that grows nevermore again,
As a reed with the reeds in the river.'"

His voice died away into silence. "That is the price which the writer
pays. He is separated, as it were, from his kind."

"Oh, no," Marie-Louise breathed, "oh, no. Not you. Your writings bring
you--close. Your book made me--cry."

She was such a child as she stood there, yet with something in her, too,
of womanliness.

"When your three soldiers died," she said, "it made me believe something
that I hadn't believed before--about souls marching toward a
great--light."

Geoffrey found himself confiding in