to smooth out
the rough places. Ever since, he makes a point of coming to me and
talking a few minutes when I am at the office or when he passes me on my
way to the drafting rooms where I take my lessons. The day I mention I
had worked late and hard the night before. I had done the last possible
thing to the plans for my dream house. At the last minute, getting it
all on paper, working at the specifications, at which you know I am
wobbly, was nervous business; and when I came from the desk after having
turned in my plans, perhaps I showed fatigue. Anyway, he said to me that
his car was below. He said also that he was a lonely person, having lost
his wife two years ago, and not being able very frequently to see his
little daughter who is in the care of her grandmother, there were times
when he was hungry for the companionship he had lost. He asked me if I
would go with him for a drive and I told him that I would. I am rather
stunned yet over what happened. The runabout he led me to was greatly
like yours, and, Linda, he stopped at a florist's and came out with an
armload of bloom--exquisite lavender and pale pink and faint yellow and
waxen white--the most enticing armload of spring. For one minute I
truly experienced a thrill. I thought he was going to give that mass of
flowers to me, but he did not. He merely laid it across my lap and said:
"Edith adored the flowers from bulbs. I never see such bloom that my
heart does not ache with a keen, angry ache to think that she should be
taken from the world, and the beauty that she so loved, so early and so
ruthlessly. We'll take her these as I would take them to her were she
living."

So, Linda dear, I sat there and looked at color and drank in fragrance,
and we whirled through the city and away to a cemetery on a beautiful
hill, and filled a vase inside the gates of a mausoleum with these
appealing flowers. Then we sat down, and a man with a hurt heart told
me about his hurt, and what an effort he was making to get through the
world as the woman he loved would have had him; and before I knew what
I was doing, Linda, I told him the tellable part of my own hurts. I even
lifted my turban and bowed my white head before him. This hurt--it was
one of the inexorable things that come to people in this world--I could
talk about. That deeper hurt, which has put a scar that never will be
effaced on my soul, of course I could not tell him about. But when we
went back to the car he said