pollo. He did feel very
rich, not only in his youth, but in the unnamed possibilities trembling
before him; and Peter denied himself no pleasure because it was
inappropriate to the moment. It would have seemed to him a refusal of
the good gifts of life and an affronting of the God who created plenty
if, because he had lost Electra, he renounced the delight of a happiness
he really felt. By and by he would remember Electra, how dignified she
was, how irreproachable, in the moments when her virtues did not get the
bit between their teeth and dash away with her; but now, under this
abounding summer sun, with the leaves trembling, she withdrew into a
gray seclusion like an almost forgotten task--one that had resolved
itself into a beneficent fulfillment quite unlike what it had promised.
Noble as it was, he had been excused from it, and he felt blissfully
free. Something else that swam before him like the gleam of a vision did
not look like another task. It was more like a quest for a hero's
arming. It fitted his dreams, it went hand in hand with the visions he
had had years ago about his painting, when that was all possibility, not
work. This was the worshipful righting of an innocent lady.

She was there in view when he got home, as if she had waited for him,
under a tree, trembled about by the summer green, her white dress
flickered upon by leaves. She was pale; her mouth looked piteous to him,
and his heart beat hard in championship. She half rose from her chair,
and let her unread book fall to the grass beside her.

There were two things Rose wanted very much to know: whether Electra had
shocked him out of his trust in her, and why her father stayed so long
in that visit to Osmond at the plantation. The last question was the
great one, and she asked it first.

"What can my father be saying to him?"

"Osmond? I don't know. Equal rights, labor, capital, God knows. Rose,
don't sit there. Please get up!"

She obeyed, wondering, brushed out her skirt and put her hair straight,
and then glanced at him.

"What for?" she asked. "What do you want me to do?"

Peter looked to her about eighteen, perhaps, nothing but youth and gleam
and gay good luck. She felt a thousand years older herself, yet she
loved Peter dearly. She would do anything for him. This she told herself
in the moment of smoothing down her hair. His face brimmed over with
fun, with something else, too. The seriousness that dwells housemate to
comedy was be