rst time I saw
you. I wondered then if you were beautiful--I always knew you had nice
eyes--and it isn't so much that you've changed, as that the longer a
man looks at you the prettier you are."

"Shall we discuss other things than me?" asked Eleanor.

"Why shouldn't we talk about you? I've never had a chance before--just
think, it's the first time ever I saw you alone--even that time on the
ranch a bull chaperoned us!" This minor joke, like every play of his
spirit, gained a hundred times its own inherent effect by sifting
through his personality. She smiled back to his smile at the boyish
ripples about his mouth and eyes.

"You see, it means a lot when a girl sticks in a man's mind that way,"
he continued. "Why, I've carried you around right through my Senior
year at college and my first year out. So of course, it must mean
something."

The open windows of Eleanor's bower looked out upon a bay tree, a
little thing awaiting its slaughter--for shade trees might not grow
too near the windows in San Francisco. It was flopping its
lance-leaves against the panes; puffs of the breeze brought in a
suggestion of its pungency. That magic sense, so closely united with
memory--it brought back a faint impression upon her. Her very panic at
this ghost of old imaginations inspired the inquiry, barbed and
shafted with secret malice:

"How many really nice girls have you known in that time?"

Bertram, sitting in considerable comfort on the window seat, flashed
his eyes across his shoulder to her.

"Oh, a few in my Senior year, not many this year. What's a man going
to do on twelve a week?" She noticed the indelicacy of this, since he
spoke in the house of his employer. But the next sentence from him was
even more startling:

"The last time I was in love was down in High School at Tulare. She's
married a fellow in the salt business now. I guess she was pretty:
anyway, her hair was the color of molasses candy. I wrote a poem to
her the first day I saw her."

"A poem?" asked Eleanor.

"You do well to ask that," said Bertram, throwing on one of those
literary phrases by which, in the midst of his plain, Anglo-Saxon
speech, he was recalling that he was a university man. "It rhymed,
after a fashion."

"You don't know how to be in love until you're older," he went on.

("Even that bay scent brings up only wonder, not emotion; and I can
laugh at him all the way," she thought. Yet in this tiny triumph
Eleanor was not entirely