he early twilights there was time for an
enchanted hour in the gloaming. The gloaming and the blossoms and the
languorous heat and the heavy scents continued to act on Claude's senses
as a love-philter might in his veins.

It was the kind of meeting to be clandestine. Secrecy was a necessary
ingredient in its deliciousness. The charm of the whole relation was in
its being kept _sub rosa_. _Sub rosa_ was the term. It should remain
under the rose where it had had its origin. It should be a stolen bliss
in a man's life and not a daily staple. That was something Thor would
never understand, that a man's life needed a stolen bliss to give it
piquancy. There was a kind of bliss which when it ceased to be hidden
ceased to be exquisite. Mysteries were seductive because they were
mysteries, not because they were proclaimed and expounded in the
market-place. Rosie in her working-dress among the fern-trees and the
great white Easter lilies was Rosie as a mystery, as a bliss. It was the
pity of pities that she couldn't be left so, where she belonged--in the
state in which she met so beautifully all the requirements of taste. To
drag her out, and put her into spheres she wasn't meant for, and endow
her with five thousand dollars a year, was like exposing a mermaid, the
glory of her own element, by pulling her from the water.

He grew conscious of this, as he always did the minute they touched on
the practical. In general he avoided the practical in order to keep
within the range of topics of which his love was not afraid. But at
times it was necessary to speak of the future, and when they did the
poor mermaid showed her fins and tail. She could neither walk nor dance
nor fly; she could only flounder. There was no denying the fact that
poor little Rosie floundered. She floundered because she was obliged to
deal with life on a scale of which she had no experience, but as to
which Claude had keenly developed social sensibilities. Not that she was
pretentious; she was only what he called pathetic, with a pathos that
would have made him grieve for her if he hadn't been grieving for
himself.

He had asked her idea of their married life, since she had again
expressed her inability to fall in with his. "Oh, Rosie, let us go and
live in Paris!" he had exclaimed, to which she had replied, as she had
replied so many times already: "Claude, darling, how _can_ I? How can I
leave them, when they've no one else?"

"Then if we get married, what