member, you have a tendency toward wavering
that prevents you from being the entire light of my life."

Amory drew his horse up close beside, and, leaning toward her, grasped
her hand.

"Say I am--_quick_, or I'll pull you over and make you ride behind me."

She looked up and smiled and shook her head excitedly.

"Oh, do!--or rather, don't! Why are all the exciting things so
uncomfortable, like fighting and exploring and ski-ing in Canada? By
the way, we're going to ride up Harper's Hill. I think that comes in our
programme about five o'clock."

"You little devil," Amory growled. "You're going to make me stay up all
night and sleep in the train like an immigrant all day to-morrow, going
back to New York."

"Hush! some one's coming along the road--let's go! Whoo-ee-oop!" And
with a shout that probably gave the belated traveller a series of
shivers, she turned her horse into the woods and Amory followed slowly,
as he had followed her all day for three weeks.

The summer was over, but he had spent the days in watching Eleanor, a
graceful, facile Manfred, build herself intellectual and imaginative
pyramids while she revelled in the artificialities of the temperamental
teens and they wrote poetry at the dinner-table.

When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he
pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever
know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:

"Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said... yet Beauty
vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead...

--Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:

"Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his
sonnet there"... So all my words, however true, might sing
you to a thousandth June, and no one ever _know_ that you were
Beauty for an afternoon.

So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the "Dark
Lady of the Sonnets," and how little we remembered her as the great man
wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare _must_ have desired, to have
been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should
live... and now we have no real interest in her.... The irony of it is
that if he had cared _more_ for the poem than for the lady the sonnet
would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have
read it after twenty years....

This was the last night Amory ever saw Eleanor. He was leaving in the
morning and they had agreed to ta