ean discipline that she had learned to
manage pauses with ease. In her Frisbee days she might have packed
this one with a random fluency; now she was content to let it widen
slowly before them like the spacious prospect opening at their feet.
The complicated beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it
between the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace,
touched him anew through her nearness, as with the hint of some vast
impersonal power, controlling and regulating her life in ways he
could not guess, putting between himself and her the whole width of
the civilization into which her marriage had absorbed her. And there
was such fear in the thought--he read such derision of what he had
to offer in the splendour of the great avenues tapering upward to
the sunset glories of the Arch--that all he had meant to say when he
finally spoke compressed itself at last into an abrupt unmitigated:
"Well?"

She answered at once--as though she had only awaited the call of the
national interrogation--"I don't know when I have been so happy."

"So happy?" The suddenness of his joy flushed up through his fair
skin.

"As I was just now--taking tea with your mother and sisters."

Durham's "Oh!" of surprise betrayed also a note of disillusionment,
which she met only by the reconciling murmur: "Shall we sit down?"

He found two of the springy yellow chairs indigenous to the spot,
and placed them under the tree near which they had paused, saying
reluctantly, as he did so: "Of course it was an immense pleasure to
_them_ to see you again."

"Oh, not in the same way. I mean--" she paused, sinking into the
chair, and betraying, for the first time, a momentary inability to
deal becomingly with the situation. "I mean," she resumed smiling,
"that it was not an event for them, as it was for me."

"An event?" he caught her up again, eagerly; for what, in the
language of any civilization, could that word mean but just the one
thing he most wished it to?

"To be with dear, good, sweet, simple, real Americans again!" she
burst out, heaping up her epithets with reckless prodigality.

Durham's smile once more faded to impersonality, as he rejoined,
just a shade on the defensive: "If it's merely our Americanism you
enjoyed--I've no doubt we can give you all you want in that line."

"Yes, it's just that! But if you knew what the word means to me! It
means--it means--" she paused as if to assure herself that they were
sufficiently