sm.

"Sit down in the morris chair ... you look dusty and heated ... I'll
entertain you ... I'm all alone ... Penton is dictating an article to
Ruth. Darrie's washing her hair. I'm the only member of the Leisure
Class. I'm lazing here, reading Gorky's latest novel."

What an engaging, pretty, naive, little woman this was! I commented
inwardly. A sweet aroma of feminine health breathed from her body,
bosom, hair--a tumbly black mass--as perfume breathes from a wild
flower.

Strangely enough, I felt calm and happy in her presence; at home, as I
had never been with any woman or girl before.

Up to this moment, when alone with a woman, timidity had touched me to
ice, while inwardly I had trembled with suppressed passion and fright.

Set in the midst of a group of women, I shone. As at the university,
when I used to visit whole sorority chapters at once, and, with from
five to ten girls seated about me in the parlour, talk brilliantly and
easily and poetically with all of them. Left alone with any _one_, my
mouth dried like sand, my tongue clove to my palate, I shook all over as
with a palsy.

With Hildreth Baxter I was straightway, marvellously, at my ease. We
talked of Keats--she seemed to know all of his verse by heart....

Shelley--she quoted his less-known fragments....

"O WORLD! O LIFE! O TIME!--"

"O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more--Oh, never more!

"Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and the winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more--Oh, never more!"

"Surely that does not express your feelings--and you still a young and
beautiful woman?"

"No, but I am profoundly moved by the sad beauty of it; and by the fact
that perhaps Poe got his refrain of 'nevermore' for his _Raven_ as a
reminiscence from it."

She laughed engagingly with feminine inconsequence and stooped down to
recover a slight, silver bracelet that had slipped off over one of her
small hands. I caught a brief glimpse of the white division of her
breasts as she stooped over. The vision stabbed my heart with keen
enjoyment that pained....

Already we were caught up in a current of mysterious fellow-feeling that
was soon to bear us onward to the full ocean of frank love and passion.
Though at this time neither she nor I perceive