ned to fill a high and influential place. A professor's wife? It
is unthinkable! And then abruptly appears a street vender beside me. I
smell his roasting chestnuts. And again--again, "I see the saffron woods
of yesterday!"

About two days after I went chestnutting with Mr. Jennings, I went
picnicking. We built a fire in the corner of two stones and cooked chops
and bacon. Two days after that we tramped to an old farm-house, five
miles straight-away north, and drank sweet cider--rather warm--from a
jelly tumbler with a rough rim. Once we had some tea and thick slabs of
bread in a country hotel by the roadside. Often we pillage orchards for
apples. Day before yesterday we stopped in a dismantled vegetable garden
and pulled a raw turnip from out of the frosty ground. Mr. Jennings
scraped the dirt away and pared off a little morsel with his pocket
knife. He offered it to me, then took a piece himself.

"Same old taste," I laughed.

"Same old taste," he laughed back. And we looked into each other's eyes
in sympathetic appreciation of raw turnip. As he wiped the blade of his
knife he added, "If I didn't know it wasn't so, I would swear we played
together as children. Most young ladies, of this age, do not care for
raw turnips."

A thrill passed through me. I blessed my brothers who had enriched my
childhood with the lore of out-of-doors. I blessed even the difficult
circumstances of my father's finances, which had forced me as a little
girl to seek my pleasures in fields and woods and tilled gardens. Had I
once said that my nature required a luxurious environment? I had been
mistaken. I gazed upon Robert Jennings standing there before me in the
forlorn garden. Bare brown hills were his background. The wind swept
down bleakly from the east, bearing with it the dank odor of frostbitten
cauliflower. Swift, sharp memories of my childhood swept over me.
Smothered traditions stirred in my heart. All the young sweet impulses
of my youth took sudden possession of me, and through a mist that
blurred my eyes I recognized with a little stab in my breast--that was
half joy, half fear--I recognized before me my perfect comrade!

Last night Lucy had one of her dinners and one of the men invited was
Robert Jennings. She had increased the usual number of six to eight. "A
real party," she explained to me, "with a fish course!"

For no other dinner party in my life did I dress with more care or
trembling expectation. Lucy's dinners are