etime. You are going to let me come to
see you, aren't you?'

'Would you like to? I'd be ever so pleased. I'm never busy after six
o'clock, and I let my sewing girls go at half-past five. I board, to
save time, but sometimes I cook a chop for myself, and I'd be glad to
cook one for you. Well'--she began to put on her white gloves--'it's
been awful good to see you, Jim.'

'You needn't hurry, need you? You've hardly told me anything yet.'

'We can talk when you come to see me. I expect you don't often have lady
visitors. The old woman downstairs didn't want to let me come up very
much. I told her I was from your home town, and had promised your
grandmother to come and see you. How surprised Mrs. Burden would be!'
Lena laughed softly as she rose.

When I caught up my hat, she shook her head. 'No, I don't want you to go
with me. I'm to meet some Swedes at the drugstore. You wouldn't care for
them. I wanted to see your room so I could write Tony all about it, but
I must tell her how I left you right here with your books. She's always
so afraid someone will run off with you!' Lena slipped her silk sleeves
into the jacket I held for her, smoothed it over her person, and
buttoned it slowly. I walked with her to the door. 'Come and see me
sometimes when you're lonesome. But maybe you have all the friends
you want. Have you?' She turned her soft cheek to me. 'Have you?' she
whispered teasingly in my ear. In a moment I watched her fade down the
dusky stairway.

When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than
before. Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight.
How I loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and
appreciative gave a favourable interpretation to everything. When I
closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls
and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It
came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls
like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in
the world, there would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the
first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung
to it as if it might suddenly vanish.

As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across
the harvest-field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an
actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and
underneath it stood the