all fine things seemed to regard his tastes as naivete, and to have won
away from them, as if he had set "above all wisdom and subtlety" the
unquenchable spirit which he knew. And withal he was so merry, so human,
so big, and so good-looking. "Handsome as Calvert Oldmoxon," the older
ones in Friendship were accustomed to say,--save Calliope, whom I had
never heard say that,--but I myself, if I had not had my simile already
selected, would have said "as Abel Halsey." If a god were human, I think
that Abel would have been very like a god. And to this opinion his
experiences were continually bearing witness.

That night, for example, he was in the merriest humour, and told us a
tale of how, that day, the sky had fallen. There had been down on the
Pump pasture, deep fog, white and thick and folded in, and above him
blue sky, when he had emerged on the Hill Road and driven on with his
eyes shut. ("When I need an adventure," he said, "I just trot old Major
Mary with my eyes shut. Courting death isn't half as costly as they
think it is.") And when he had opened his eyes, the sky was gone, and
everything was white and thick and folded in and fabulous. Obviously, as
he convinced us, the sky had fallen. But he had driven on through it and
in it, and had found it, as I recall his account, to be made of
inextinguishable dreams. These, Abel ran on, are on the other side of
the sky for anybody who claims them, and our sandwiches were, above all
sandwiches, delicious. He was so merry that Calliope and I, by a nod or
a smile of understanding, played our role of merely, so to say, proving
that the films were right--for you may have an inspired conversational
photographer, but unless you are properly prepared chemically he can get
no pictures. As Calliope had said of her evening with Eb and Elspie,
"the air in the room was easy to get through with what you had to
say--it was that kind of evening." Sometimes I wonder if an hour like
that is real time; or is it, instead, a kind of chronometrical fairy,
having no real existence on the dial, but only in essence.

As I think of it now the hour, if it was an hour, was simply a
background for Delia More. For it was not only Calliope and I who
responded to Abel's light-hearted talk, but, little by little, it was
Delia too. Perhaps it was that faint spark in her--fanned to life on the
night of her coming home, so that she "took stock"--which we now divined
faintly quickening to Abel's humour, h