ing more
engrossing,--if I may so describe it,--and spring was approaching. The
stars in their courses were conspiring. I was by no means as yet a
self-acknowledged wooer, and we discussed love in its lighter phases
through the medium of literature. Heaven forgive me for calling it so!
About that period, it will be remembered, a mushroom growth of volumes of
a certain kind sprang into existence; little books with "artistic"
bindings and wide margins, sweetened essays, some of them written in
beautiful English by dilettante authors for drawing-room consumption; and
collections of short stories, no doubt chiefly bought by philanderers
like myself, who were thus enabled to skate on thin ice over deep water.
It was a most delightful relationship that these helped to support, and I
fondly believed I could reach shore again whenever I chose.

There came a Sunday in early May, one of those days when the feminine
assumes a large importance. I had been to the Hutchinses' church; and
Maude, as she sat and prayed decorously in the pew beside me, suddenly
increased in attractiveness and desirability. Her voice was very sweet,
and I felt a delicious and languorous thrill which I identified not only
with love, but also with a reviving spirituality. How often the two seem
to go hand in hand!

She wore a dress of a filmy material, mauve, with a design in gold thread
running through it. Of late, it seemed, she had had more new dresses: and
their modes seemed more cosmopolitan; at least to the masculine eye. How
delicately her hair grew, in little, shining wisps, around her white
neck! I could have reached out my hand and touched her. And it was this
desire,--although by no means overwhelming,--that startled me. Did I
really want her? The consideration of this vital question occupied the
whole time of the sermon; made me distrait at dinner,--a large family
gathering. Later I found myself alone with heron a bench in the
Hutchinses' garden where we had walked the day of my arrival, during the
campaign.

The gardens were very different, now. The trees had burst forth again
into leaf, the spiraea bushes seemed weighted down with snow, and with a
note like that of the quivering bass string of a 'cello the bees hummed
among the fruit blossoms. And there beside me in her filmy dress was
Maude, a part of it all--the meaning of all that set my being clamouring.
She was like some ripened, delicious flower ready to be picked.... One of
those per