ause of that I wanted to see you," she said, "because you are
the only person, I believe, who can really understand."

"I think I can, my dear."

"You have had beautiful dreams, too, that were false ones?"

"It isn't that the dreams are false," he replied, "but that the stuff of
this earth isn't the kind to grow illusions. They must either wither in
the bud or be wrenched up root and branch."

"And there's only the ugly reality, after all?"

"There's only the reality, but it isn't ugly when one grows accustomed
to it. You'll find it good enough for you yet, my child."

"No--no," she said, "I've always lived on pretty lies, I see that
now--I've always had to find an outlet for my imagination, however
false. My poetry was never more than this--it was all quotation--all a
reflection of the things I had wanted to feel in life. I never wrote a
sincere line," she added.

He pressed her hand--it was his way of showing that he loved her none
the less because she was not a poet--and then as the unnatural wanness
overspread her face, he went out softly, leaving her in Gerty's care. By
different roads they had come at last to the same place in life--she
with her blighted youth and he with his beautiful old age and his
disappointed hopes.

With the beginning of the year Gerty went South with her, but the soft
air or the cold made little difference to Laura, when, as she said, she
could feel neither. There had been no outburst of grief; since the night
when she had wept on Gerty's bosom, she had not shed a tear; and once
when Gerty had alluded to Kemper in her hearing, she had listened with
the polite attention she might have bestowed upon the name of a
stranger. At Gerty's bidding she came or went, admired or disapproved,
but of her old impulsive energy there was so little left that Gerty
sometimes wondered if her friend had really, as she insisted, "turned to
stone." For Laura's face even had frozen until it wore the impassive
smile of a statue, and there was in her movements and her voice
something of the insensibility of extreme old age. She was no longer
young, nor was she middle-aged; it was as if she had outlived, not only
the emotions, but the years of life.

In April they came back again, and on the morning after their return
Gerty paid a dejected visit to Adams in his office.

"I can do nothing with her--she's turned to stone," she said.

"Oh, she'll come alive again," he responded. "Where is she?"

"In Grame