rms and how could I
continue this futile demonstration? But why also desist? The sweat began
to stand out on my forehead. What should I say? Uncle Tom no longer
stood between us. Isabel was my bride. There were no barriers to break
down, no protests to overcome. We were both of an age and of an
experience where formalities lose their significance. The goddess had
descended to me and here was I a witless fool. Finally there flashed
into my mind what she had said to me in Rome: "My friend, for this once
be Orpheus--Orpheus was once Dionysius. Orpheus, tranquil and inspired,
touched the quiet lyre surrounded by the Muses. Orpheus had been
Dionysius drinking wine, beating cymbals. Be Orpheus, my friend, and
take into your being these beauties of the mind which are given
us--these flowers of friendship attend and keep for our garden."

These words ran through my tortured brain. They completed my enervation.
But I could utter none of them to Isabel. What fear that hatred was
budding in the heart of this woman at my side! I pressed her hands every
now and then to see what was moving in her; for as my mind would not
cease to analyze, analysis became keener. Always she returned the
pressure. Her kisses at first given with ardent emotion were now lisped
softly against my cheek. So we sat side by side. The rain pelted the
window, the clock chimed. And the night was passing. A proposal of
marriage seemed belated, incongruous. Yet it came into my mind as a
protective coloration to more immediate expressions of the moment.

Men have lost women because they dishonored them or betrayed them or
changed for the time toward them--for a thousand reasons. But look at
me. What were friendship, truth, honor, the service of all that I was,
love in its highest and deepest sense, understanding, sympathy with all
of Isabel's flights of the mind, if I could not come to her with a
promise of the future? She was not only the revelation of all that I had
desired and of all that I had missed in life, but she was the symbol of
a fate that has come past the appointed hour. I was the father of
Reverdy by Dorothy, whom I loved with a heart's beginning; and I was the
defeated lover of the ideal whom I had found too late.

In these circumstances of myself and Isabel were symbolized the lives of
all men who give their devotions to lesser loves, who find their
creations and their work imperfect or worthless when the planting season
has passed.

As hollow