ngly ugly in me so much as thought of showing its head.
Three years before in this stirring town I had felt guilty at being a
monk. But now I felt no guilt at all. For down the Champs Elysees our
cab rolled serenely now, and even our driver's white hat wore an air as
though it had a place in life.

From Paris we started for Munich, but we did not stop there, we happened
to feel like going on. So we went through to Constantinople, whence we
took a boat to Batoum and went up into the Caucasus, which Eleanore had
heard about once from an engineer friend of her father's. I remember
Koutais, a little town by a mountain torrent with gray vine-covered
walls around it. Shops opened into the walls like stalls. There we would
buy things for our supper and then in a crazy vehicle we would drive
miles out on the broad mountainside to an orchard pink with blossoms,
where we would build a fire and cook, and an old man in a long yellow
robe and with a turban on his head would come out of his cabin and bring
us wine. And the stars would appear and the frogs tune up in the marshes
far down in the valley below, and the filmy mists would rise and the
mountains would tower overhead. And the effect of this place upon us was
to make us feel it was only one of innumerable such vacation places that
lay ahead, festival spots in long, radiant lives. We felt this vaguely,
silently. So often we talked silently.

Then there would come the most serious times, when with the deepest
thoughtfulness we would survey the years ahead and very solemnly place
ourselves, our views and beliefs. Miraculous how agreed we were! We
believed, we found, in good workmanship, in honest building, in getting
things done. We believed in Eleanore's father and all those around and
above him that could help his kind of work. We were impatient of
soft-headedness in rich people who had nothing to do, and of heavy
muddle-headedness in the millions who had too much to do, and of
muckraking of every kind which only got in the way of the builders. For
the building of a new, clean vigorous world was our religion. And it did
not seem cold to us, because our lives were in it and because we were
in love.

There was no end to the plans for ourselves, for my writing, our home,
the friends we wanted, the trips, the books and the music. And through
it all and from under it all there kept bursting up that feeling which
we knew was the most important of all, the exultant realization that