e marching over
the gardens outside. He envied that poem. How he would have loved to
have come along and seen her on the wall and talked nonsense or romance
to her, perched above him in the air. He began to be frightfully jealous
of everything about Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and
women who flocked to drink deep of her cool kindness and rest their
tired minds as at an absorbing play.

"_Nobody_ seems to bore you," he objected.

"About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that's a pretty
good average, don't you?" and she turned to find something in Browning
that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who
could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of
the conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it
constantly, with such a serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching
her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled ever so little at
hunting her sentence.

Through early March he took to going to Philadelphia for week-ends.
Almost always there was some one else there and she seemed not anxious
to see him alone, for many occasions presented themselves when a word
from her would have given him another delicious half-hour of adoration.
But he fell gradually in love and began to speculate wildly on marriage.
Though this design flowed through his brain even to his lips, still
he knew afterward that the desire had not been deeply rooted. Once he
dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in his
dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone out of her
hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her changeling tongue. But
she was the first fine woman he ever knew and one of the few good people
who ever interested him. She made her goodness such an asset. Amory
had decided that most good people either dragged theirs after them as a
liability, or else distorted it to artificial geniality, and of course
there were the ever-present prig and Pharisee--(but Amory never included
_them_ as being among the saved).

*****

ST. CECILIA

"Over her gray and velvet dress,
Under her molten, beaten hair,
Color of rose in mock distress
Flushes and fades and makes her fair;
Fills the air from her to him
With light and languor and little sighs,
Just so subtly he scarcely knows...
Laughing lightning, color of rose."

"Do you like me?"

"Of course I do," said Clara s