given in words of that bond between two,
when the woman stands near the foot of the upward slope of life,
and the man is already passing down on the sunset side, with
lengthening afternoon shadows on the gray of his temples--between
them the cold separating peaks of a generation?

Such a generation of toiling years separated Professor Hardage from
Isabel Conyers. When, at the age of twenty, she returned after
years of absence in an eastern college--it was a tradition of her
family that its women should be brilliantly educated--he verged
upon fifty. To his youthful desires that interval was nothing; but
to his disciplined judgment it was everything.

"Even though it could be," he said to himself, "it should not be,
and therefore it shall not."

His was an idealism that often leaves its holder poor indeed save
in the possession of its own incorruptible wealth. No doubt also
the life-long study of the ideals of classic time came to his
guidance now with their admonitions of exquisite balance, their
moderation and essential justness.

But after he had given up all hope of her, he did not hesitate to
draw her to him in other ways; and there was that which drew her
unfathomably to him--all the more securely since in her mind there
was no thought that the bond between them would ever involve the
possibility of love and marriage.

His library became another home to her. One winter she read Greek
with him--authors not in her college course. Afterward he read
much more Greek to her. Then they laid Greek aside, and he took
her through the history of its literature and through that other
noble one, its deathless twin.

When she was not actually present, he yet took her with him through
the wide regions of his studies---set her figure in old Greek
landscapes and surrounded it with dim shapes of loveliness--saw her
sometimes as the perfection that went into marble--made her a
portion of legend and story, linking her with Nausicaa and
Andromache and the lost others. Then quitting antiquity with her
altogether, he passed downward with her into the days of chivalry,
brought her to Arthur's court, and invested her with one character
after another, trying her by the ladies of knightly ideals--reading
her between the lines in all the king's idyls.

But last and best, seeing her in the clear white light of her own
country and time--as the spirit of American girlhood, pure,
refined, faultlessly proportioned in mental and ph