Dr. Theophilus,
"no small wits in my head," who could stand, dumb and a clown, in a
ballroom, who could even trip up my partner, had found words that could
arrest the gaze of the woman before me. To talk at all I must talk of
big things, and it was of big things that I now spoke--of poverty, of
struggle, of failure, of aspiration. My mind, like my body, was not
rounded to the lighter graces, the rippling surface, that society
requires. In my everyday clothes, among men, I was at no loss for words,
but the high collar and the correctly tied cravat I wore seemed to
strangle my throat, until those starry eyes, seeking big things also,
had looked into mine. Then I forgot my fruitless efforts at
conversation, I forgot the height of my collar, the stiffness of my
shirt, the size of my hands and my feet. I forgot that I was a plain
man, and remembered only that I was a man. The merely social, the
trivial, the commonplace, dropped from my thoughts. My dignity,--the
dignity that George Bolingbroke had called that of size,--was restored
to me; and beyond the rosy lights and the disturbing music, we stood a
man and a woman together. Our consciousness had left the surface of
life. We had become acutely aware of each other and aware, too, of the
silence in which our eyes wavered and met.

"That was why I starved and sweated and drudged and longed," I added,
while her fan waved with its large, slow movement between us, "that was
why--"

Her lips parted, she leaned slightly forward, and I saw in her face what
I had never seen in the face of a woman before--the bloom of a soul.

"And you've done this all your life?"

"Since that stormy evening."

"You have won--already you have won--"

"Not yet. I am beginning and I may win in the end if I keep steady, if I
don't lose my head. I shall win in the end--perhaps--"

"You will win what?"

"A fortune it may be, or it may be even the thing that has made the
fortune seem worth the having."

"And that is?" she asked simply.

"It is too long a story. Some day, if you will listen, I may tell you,
but not now--"

The dance stopped, she rose to her feet, and George Bolingbroke, rushing
excitedly to where we stood, claimed the coming Virginia reel as his
own.

"Some day you shall tell me the long story, Ben Starr," she said, as she
gave me her hand.

I watched her take her place in the Virginia reel, watched the dance
begin, watched her full, womanly figure, in its soft white drape