ly shall."

She sat up and began making her simple toilet. She shook down her hair,
and it fell about her in a brown cloud, hiding her face and shoulders.
Dear, damp brown hair! I wanted to kiss it, to ripple it through my
fingers, to bury my face in it. I gazed entranced, till the boat ran
into the wind and the flapping sail warned me I was not attending to my
duties. Idealist and romanticist that I was and always had been in spite
of my analytical nature, yet I had failed till now in grasping much of
the physical characteristics of love. The love of man and woman, I had
always held, was a sublimated something related to spirit, a spiritual
bond that linked and drew their souls together. The bonds of the flesh
had little part in my cosmos of love. But I was learning the sweet
lesson for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed itself,
through the flesh; that the sight and sense and touch of the loved one's
hair was as much breath and voice and essence of the spirit as the light
that shone from the eyes and the thoughts that fell from the lips. After
all, pure spirit was unknowable, a thing to be sensed and divined only;
nor could it express itself in terms of itself. Jehovah was
anthropomorphic because he could address himself to the Jews only in
terms of their understanding; so he was conceived as in their own image,
as a cloud, a pillar of fire, a tangible, physical something which the
mind of the Israelites could grasp.

And so I gazed upon Maud's light-brown hair, and loved it, and learned
more of love than all the poets and singers had taught me with all their
songs and sonnets. She flung it back with a sudden adroit movement, and
her face emerged, smiling.

"Why don't women wear their hair down always?" I asked. "It is so much
more beautiful."

"If it didn't tangle so dreadfully," she laughed. "There! I've lost one
of my precious hair-pins!"

I neglected the boat and had the sail spilling the wind again and again,
such was my delight in following her every movement as she searched
through the blankets for the pin. I was surprised, and joyfully, that
she was so much the woman, and the display of each trait and mannerism
that was characteristically feminine gave me keener joy. For I had been
elevating her too highly in my concepts of her, removing her too far from
the plane of the human, and too far from me. I had been making of her a
creature goddess-like and unapproachable. So I hai