the world?"

Perry removed the plates and made the coffee. Rosalie did not drink
coffee. She wandered out into the garden, and came back with three
violets, which she kissed and stuck in Perry's coat.

The next morning when I came down Rosalie was cutting bread for toast.
She was always exquisitely neat, and in her white linen and in her
white-tiled kitchen she seemed indubitably domestic. I was hungry and
had hopes of her efforts.

"Peer is setting the table", she told me.

She always called him "Peer". She had her own way of finding names for
people. I was never "Roger", but "Jim Crow". When questioned as to her
reason for the appellation she decided vaguely that it might be some
connection of ideas--dances--Sir Roger de Coverley--and didn't somebody
"dance Jim Crow"?

"You don't mind, do you?" she had asked, and I had replied that I did
not.

I did not confess how much I liked it. I had always been treated in a
distinctly distant and dignified fashion by my family and friends, so
that Rosalie's easy assumption of intimacy was delightful.

Well, I went out on the porch and left Rosalie to her culinary devices.
I found the morning paper, and fifteen minutes later there came up
across the lawn a radiant figure.

Rosalie, hearing the garden call, had chucked responsibility--and her
arms were full of daffodils!

We had burned toast for breakfast! Rosalie had forgotten it and Perry
had not rescued it until it was well charred. There was no bread to make
more, so we had to eat it.

For the rest we had coffee and fruit. It was an expensive season for
eggs, and Rosalie had her eye on a bit of old brocade which was to light
a corner of her studio. She breakfasted contentedly on grapefruit, but
Perry was rather silent, and I saw for the first time a shadow on his
countenance. I wondered if for the moment his mind had wandered to the
past, and to his mother's table, with Sunday waffles, omelet, broiled
bacon. Yet--there had been no bits of gay brocade to light the
mid-Victorian dullness of his mother's dining-room, no daffodils on a
radiant morning, no white lilacs on a purple twilight, no slender
goddess, mysterious as the moon.

It was in the middle of the following winter that I began to realize
that Perry was not well. He had come home on a snowy night, tired and
chilled to the bone. He was late and Rosalie had kept dinner waiting for
him. It was a rather sorry affair when it was served. Perry pushed his
chair