handled though or I should be her slave. Her husband was a broker, or
something like that, and died during a panic, and as she was in
straitened circumstances she came to us. You see, she knows everybody,
and is awfully well connected. You must be very nice to her, David."

She called me David as naturally as though it really had been yesterday
that we went fishing in the meadow. My heart beat quicker. I laughed
aloud for the sheer joy of living in the same world with her. I vowed
that I should be very nice indeed to Mrs. Bannister. Had Penelope
asked me to be very nice to her friend Medusa I should have given her
my pledge. Subtly, by her admonition, she had conveyed to me the
promise that this walk was to be but the first of many walks, the
rambles of our childhood over again, but grown older and wiser and more
sedate. Under what other circumstances could I be nice to Mrs.
Bannister?

Having settled my line of conduct toward the martial woman with the
Pomeranian, I began my account of the years missing in our friendship.
It was very brief. It is astonishing in how few words a man can sum up
his life's accomplishment if he holds to the essential facts. Since
that day when she had left the farm with Rufus Blight I had studied
under Mr. Pound, spent four years in college and three years working on
a newspaper. Was I successful in my work? she asked. Fairly so, I
answered modestly. I might have told her that I had gone ahead a
little faster than my fellows, but even then seemed to advance at a
snail's pace to petty conquests, for if at the end of years I attained
to Hanks's place, I was beginning to doubt that it was worth the pains
which I was taking to win it. I did not tell her of the ambitions
which had led me into my profession, nor how all my fine ideas had been
early dissipated and I had settled down to a struggle for mere
existence. On one essential fact, too, was I silent. It arose to my
mind as I told my brief story and it spread like a cloud darkening this
brightest of my days. You know what the shadow was. By her absence,
by her remoteness, Gladys Todd had for me a shadow's unreality. At
this moment the tie between us was so attenuated that it was hard for
me to believe that it existed at all. I knew that it did exist, but I
could not surrender myself to be bound by so frail a thread. I was
silent. Childlike, I wished the clouds away. Royally, I commanded the
sea to stand back.

"A