ut I dallied. The experience was becoming
more engrossing,--if I may so describe it,--and spring was approaching.
The stars in their courses were conspiring. I was by no means as yet
a self-acknowledged wooer, and we discussed love in its lighter phases
through the medium of literature. Heaven forgive me for calling it so!
About that period, it will be remembered, a mushroom growth of volumes
of a certain kind sprang into existence; little books with "artistic"
bindings and wide margins, sweetened essays, some of them written in
beautiful English by dilettante authors for drawing-room consumption;
and collections of short stories, no doubt chiefly bought by
philanderers like myself, who were thus enabled to skate on thin ice
over deep water. It was a most delightful relationship that these helped
to support, and I fondly believed I could reach shore again whenever I
chose.

There came a Sunday in early May, one of those days when the feminine
assumes a large importance. I had been to the Hutchinses' church; and
Maude, as she sat and prayed decorously in the pew beside me, suddenly
increased in attractiveness and desirability. Her voice was very sweet,
and I felt a delicious and languorous thrill which I identified not only
with love, but also with a reviving spirituality. How often the two seem
to go hand in hand!

She wore a dress of a filmy material, mauve, with a design in gold
thread running through it. Of late, it seemed, she had had more new
dresses: and their modes seemed more cosmopolitan; at least to the
masculine eye. How delicately her hair grew, in little, shining wisps,
around her white neck! I could have reached out my hand and touched
her. And it was this desire,--although by no means overwhelming,--that
startled me. Did I really want her? The consideration of this vital
question occupied the whole time of the sermon; made me distrait at
dinner,--a large family gathering. Later I found myself alone with heron
a bench in the Hutchinses' garden where we had walked the day of my
arrival, during the campaign.

The gardens were very different, now. The trees had burst forth again
into leaf, the spiraea bushes seemed weighted down with snow, and with a
note like that of the quivering bass string of a 'cello the bees hummed
among the fruit blossoms. And there beside me in her filmy dress
was Maude, a part of it all--the meaning of all that set my being
clamouring. She was like some ripened, delicious flower r