quite serious having happened.

Eugene understood this. He tried to explain it on the grounds of
illness, stating that he was now up and feeling much better. But when
his explanation came, it had the hollow ring of insincerity. Angela
wondered what the truth could be. Was he yielding to the temptation of
that looser life that all artists were supposed to lead? She wondered
and worried, for time was slipping away and he was setting no definite
date for their much discussed nuptials.

The trouble with Angela's position was that the delay involved
practically everything which was important in her life. She was five
years older than Eugene. She had long since lost that atmosphere of
youth and buoyancy which is so characteristic of a girl between eighteen
and twenty-two. Those few short years following, when the body of
maidenhood blooms like a rose and there is about it the freshness and
color of all rich, new, lush life, were behind her. Ahead was that
persistent decline towards something harder, shrewder and less
beautiful. In the case of some persons the decline is slow and the
fragrance of youth lingers for years, the artifices of the dressmaker,
the chemist, and the jeweller being but little needed. In others it is
fast and no contrivance will stay the ravages of a restless, eager,
dissatisfied soul. Sometimes art combines with slowness of decay to make
a woman of almost perennial charm, loveliness of mind matching
loveliness of body, and taste and tact supplementing both. Angela was
fortunate in being slow to fade and she had a loveliness of imagination
and emotion to sustain her; but she had also a restless, anxious
disposition of mind which, if it had not been stayed by the kindly color
of her home life and by the fortunate or unfortunate intervention of
Eugene at a time when she considered her ideal of love to have fairly
passed out of the range of possibility, would already have set on her
face the signs of old maidenhood. She was not of the newer order of
femininity, eager to get out in the world and follow some individual
line of self-development and interest. Rather was she a home woman
wanting some one man to look after and love. The wonder and beauty of
her dream of happiness with Eugene now made the danger of its loss and
the possible compulsory continuance of a humdrum, underpaid, backwoods
existence, heart-sickening.

Meanwhile, as the summer passed, Eugene was casually enlarging his
acquaintance with w