te, trying to get you to see what sort of life
it was I led with Florence and what Florence was like. Well, she was
bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance over the floors of castles
and over seas and over and over and over the salons of modistes and over
the plages of the Riviera--like a gay tremulous beam, reflected from
water upon a ceiling. And my function in life was to keep that bright
thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to catch
with your hand that dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.

Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in
Philadelphia. They had never been to Philadelphia and they had the New
England conscience. You see, the first thing they said to me when I
called in on Florence in the little ancient, colonial, wooden house
beneath the high, thin-leaved elms--the first question they asked me was
not how I did but what did I do. And I did nothing. I suppose I ought to
have done something, but I didn't see any call to do it. Why does one do
things? I just drifted in and wanted Florence. First I had drifted in
on Florence at a Browning tea, or something of the sort in Fourteenth
Street, which was then still residential. I don't know why I had gone
to New York; I don't know why I had gone to the tea. I don't see why
Florence should have gone to that sort of spelling bee. It wasn't the
place at which, even then, you expected to find a Poughkeepsie graduate.
I guess Florence wanted to raise the culture of the Stuyvesant crowd and
did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual slumming, that
was what it was. She always wanted to leave the world a little more
elevated than she found it. Poor dear thing, I have heard her lecture
Teddy Ashburnham by the hour on the difference between a Franz Hals and
a Wouvermans and why the Pre-Mycenaean statues were cubical with knobs
on the top. I wonder what he made of it? Perhaps he was thankful.

I know I was. For do you understand my whole attentions, my whole
endeavours were to keep poor dear Florence on to topics like the finds
at Cnossos and the mental spirituality of Walter Pater. I had to keep
her at it, you understand, or she might die. For I was solemnly informed
that if she became excited over anything or if her emotions were really
stirred her little heart might cease to beat. For twelve years I had to
watch every word that any person uttered in any conversation and I had
to head it off what the