r room so I could write Tony all about it, but I
must tell her how I left you right here with your books. She's always so
afraid some one will run off with you!" Lena slipped her silk sleeves into
the jacket I held for her, smoothed it over her person, and buttoned it
slowly. I walked with her to the door. "Come and see me sometimes when
you're lonesome. But maybe you have all the friends you want. Have you?"
She turned her soft cheek to me. "Have you?" she whispered teasingly in my
ear. In a moment I watched her fade down the dusky stairway.

When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than
before. Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight. How I
loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and
appreciative--gave a favorable interpretation to everything. When I closed
my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls and the
three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over
me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and
the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there
would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the first time. This
revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might
suddenly vanish.

As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across
the harvest field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an
actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and
underneath it stood the mournful line: Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit.

III

IN Lincoln the best part of the theatrical season came late, when the good
companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long runs in
New York and Chicago. That spring Lena went with me to see Joseph
Jefferson in "Rip Van Winkle," and to a war play called "Shenandoah." She
was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said she was in business
now, and she would n't have a schoolboy spending his money on her. I liked
to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything
was true. It was like going to revival meetings with some one who was
always being converted. She handed her feelings over to the actors with a
kind of fatalistic resignation. Accessories of costume and scene meant
much more to her than to me. She sat entranced through "Robin Hood" and
hung upon the lips of the contralto who sang, "Oh