about everything, and though none the less he always had his own
way, yet the pedestal was so obvious that if she had not known otherwise
she might have thought herself continuously upon it.

The crumple was not there, or at least only such crumple as she had
naturally awaited. The discomfort of the leaf consisted in the fact that
married she was not mated, that she did not love him, and probably never
could.

Now, as she tilted her hat, the spaciousness of the name recurred to
her. Its potentialities she had considered before she accepted it, but
only because of her father. The idea that it would lift him out of the
walk-up, out of Harlem and cold veal, was the one excuse for her voyage
to Cytherea. The voyage had been eminently respectable. Undertaken with
full ecclesiastical sanction, Aphrodite and her free airs had had
nothing to do with it. None the less it was to Cytherea that she had
gone--and to Lampsacus also, for all she and her geography knew to the
contrary.

Now, though, in tilting her hat, the disreputable beauty of the land was
forgotten. She was in another and a fairer realm. A modern garden of the
Hesperides lay about her. She saw herself distributing the golden fruit.
The mirror showed her a red-crossed Lady Bountiful in an ambulance, in
two ambulances, in a herd of ambulances, at the front. There was no end
to the golden fruit, no end to his father's money, no end to the good he
might allow her to do.

The picture so delighted her that she flushed and in the emotion of it
two tears sprang to her eyes that were not of the crying kind.

She dried them, telling herself that if he framed the picture, she could
love him, and she would.

It would be all so perfect, not the loving, but the giving, the joy of
giving, the joy of always giving, of giving with both hands, of just
shovelling it out and keeping at it, of never saying "No," of saying,
"Yes, and here is more and here is more," of saying, too, "Don't thank
me, it is for me to thank you." What joy ever was there, or ever will
be, that can compare to that!

Why, I'm crazy, she thought, and thought also, he never will but he
might, he could and if he should----

Then at once the Paliser of the Savile Row clothes and the St. James's
Street boots, the Paliser of the looking-glass hair and the Oxford
voice, assumed the hue and stature of a deva. Love him! It would be
something higher. It would be worship!

She made a face. It was sheer nonsense