life, like a clear sky in
the moment before dawn....

She made a little move towards me. Impulsively, with no word said, we
kissed.

Sec. 7

I would like very much to give you a portrait of Mary as she was in
those days. Every portrait I ever had of her I burnt in the sincerity of
what was to have been our final separation, and now I have nothing of
her in my possession. I suppose that in the files of old illustrated
weeklies somewhere, a score of portraits must be findable. Yet
photographs have a queer quality of falsehood. They have no movement and
always there was a little movement about Mary just as there is always a
little scent about flowers. She was slender and graceful, so that she
seemed taller than she was, she had beautifully shaped arms and a
brightness in her face; it seemed to me always that there was light in
her face, more than the light that shone upon it. Her fair, very
slightly reddish hair--it was warm like Australian gold--flowed with a
sort of joyous bravery back from her low broad forehead; the color under
her delicate skin was bright and quick, and her mouth always smiled
faintly. There was a peculiar charm for me about her mouth, a
whimsicality, a sort of humorous resolve in the way in which the upper
lip fell upon the lower and in a faint obliquity that increased with
her quickening smile. She spoke with a very clear delicate intonation
that made one want to hear her speak again; she often said faintly
daring things, and when she did, she had that little catch in the
breath--of one who dares. She did not talk hastily; often before she
spoke came a brief grave pause. Her eyes were brightly blue except when
the spirit of mischief took her and then they became black, and there
was something about the upper and lower lids that made them not only the
prettiest but the sweetest and kindliest eyes in the world. And she
moved with a quiet rapidity, without any needless movements, to do
whatever she had a mind to do....

But how impossible it is to convey the personal charm of a human being.
I catalogue these things and it is as if she moved about silently behind
my stumbling enumeration and smiled at me still, with her eyes a little
darkened, mocking me. That phantom will never be gone from my mind. It
was all of these things and none of these things that made me hers, as I
have never been any other person's....

We grew up together. The girl of nineteen mingles in my memory with the
woman of