rely we should all like to live in a time
when a man's private life will be his only life."

After a silence he came back to her with a quiet laugh: "Here I am
talking about the future of the human race, and we have never
agreed upon our marriage ceremony! What a lover!"

"I want the most beautiful ceremony in the world."

"The ceremony of your church?" he asked with great respect, though
wincing.

"My church has no ceremony: every minister in it has his own; and
rather than have one of them write mine, I think I should rather
write it myself: shouldn't you?"

"I think I should," he said, laughing.

He drew a little book out of his breast pocket: "Perhaps you will
like this: a great many people have been married by it."

"I want the same ceremony that is used for kings and queens, for
the greatest and the best people of the earth. I will marry you by
no other!"

"A good many of them have used this," and he read to her the
ceremony of his church.

When he finished neither spoke.

It was a clear summer afternoon. Under them was the strength of
rocks; around them the noiseless growth of needful things; above
them the upward-drawing light: two working children of the New
World, two pieces of Nature's quietism.

II

It was the second morning after Marguerite's ball.

Marguerite, to herself a girl no longer, lay in the middle
of a great, fragrant, drowsy bed of carved walnut, once her
grandmother's. She had been dreaming; she had just awakened. The
sun, long since risen above the trees of the yard, was slanting
through the leaves and roses that formed an outside lattice to her
window-blinds.

These blinds were very old. They had been her grandmother's when
she was Marguerite's age; and one day, not long before this,
Marguerite, pillaging the attic, had found them and brought them
down, with adoring eyes, and put them up before her own windows.
They were of thin muslin, and on them were painted scenes
representing the River of Life, with hills and castles, valleys and
streams, in a long series; at the end there was a faint vision of a
crystal dome in the air--the Celestial City--nearly washed away.
You looked at these scenes through the arches of a ruined castle.
A young man (on one blind) has just said farewell to his parents on
the steps of the castle and is rowing away down the River of Life.
At the prow of his boat is the figurehead of a winged woman holding
an hour-glass.

Marguerite lay