d with meticulous care. If
the potpourri was at times redolent of the dried flowers of other men's
loves, Eleanor was blissfully unaware of it. When he wrote of the
lonesome October of his most immemorial year, or spoke of her pilgrim
soul coming to him at midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, she
thrilled with admiration for his genius.

Such literary masterpieces deserved adequate answers, and she found
herself trying to make up in quantity what she lacked in quality. His
letters always began, "Dearest Heloise," or "Melisande," or "Baucis," or
"Isolde"; and, rather than acknowledge her ignorance of these classic
allusions, she looked them up and sent her answers to "Dear Abelard," or
"Pelleas," or "Philemon," or "Tristan," as the case demanded. She indited
her missives with a dainty gold pen engraved with an orchid, which Harold
had requested her never to profane by secular use.

The correspondence, while throbbing with emotion, was not by any means
devoid of practical details. Harold lost no opportunity of urging Eleanor
to remain firm in her resolve to go to New York. It would be sheer folly,
he pointed out, to give up the chance of a professional debut, a chance
that might not come again in years. He pointed out that her grandfather
had changed all his plans on the strength of her coming, and would be
utterly heartbroken if she failed to keep her promise. He delicately
intimated that her failure to take the part he had so laboriously written
for her might seal the fate of "Phantom Love" and prove the downfall of
both its creators.

His conclusion to all these specious arguments was that the only way out
of the tangle was for her to consent to a nominal engagement to him that
would bind her to nothing, and yet would give him the right to send her
to New York if Madam Bartlett refused to do so. In answer to Eleanor's
doubts and misgivings, he assured her in polyphonic prose that he knew
her far better than she knew herself, and that he would be "content to
wait at the feet of little Galatea, asking nothing, giving all, until the
happy day when she should wake to life and love and the consciousness
that she was wholly and happily his."

And Galatea read his letters with increasing ardor and slept with them
under her pillow. It was all so secret and romantic, this glorious
adventure rushing to fulfilment, under the prosy surface of everyday
life. Of course she did not want to be married--not for ages and ages;