into her
long house of silence where everything is cool with the silver of Spring
rain on leaves, she had washed from them the human pettiness, the human
separateness, the human insufficiency to express the best that must come
in any mortal relationship that lasts longer than the hour. They
were not better in memory than they had been when lived, for the best
remembrance makes only brilliant ghosts, but they were in their dim
measure nearer the soul's perfection, for the tricks of the sounding
board of the mind and the feckless instrument of the body had been put
away. "We've had infinites already--infinites," thought Oliver, and
didn't care about the ludicrous ineptness of the words. He smiled,
turning back to the unwritten letter. If they hadn't had infinites
already--he supposed they wouldn't want more so badly right now. He
smiled, but this time without humor. It had all seemed so easy at first.

Nancy had been in Paris at fourteen before "business reverses" of the
kind that mild, capable-looking men like Mr. Ellicott seem to attract,
as a gingerbread man draws wasps, when they are about fifty, had reduced
him to a position as chief bookkeeper and taken Nancy out of her
first year in Farmington. Oliver had spent nine months on a graduate
scholarship in Paris and Provence in 1919. Both had friends there and
argued long playful hours planning just what sort of a magnificently
cheap apartment on the _Rive Gauche_ they would have when they went
back.

For they were going back--they had been brilliantly sure of it--Oliver
had only to finish his novel that was so much better already than any
novel Nancy had ever read--sell a number of copies of it that seemed
absurdly small in proportion to the population of America--and then they
could live where they pleased and Oliver could compose Great Works
and Nancy get ahead with her very real and delicate talent for etching
instead of having to do fashion-drawings of slinky simperers in Lucile
dresses or appetite-arousing paintings of great cans of tomato soup.
But that had been eight months ago. Vanamee and Company's--the neat
vice-president talking to Oliver--"a young hustler has every chance in
the world of getting ahead here, Mr. Crowe. You speak French? Well,
we have been thinking for some time of establishing branch-offices in
Europe." The chance of a stop-gap job in St. Louis for Nancy, where she
could be with her family for a while--she really ought to be with them a
c