ght
dissolve and vanish from my embrace. Then, at last, when the spring
came, and the woods were filled with flowering dogwood and red-bud, she
seemed to revive a little, to bloom softly again, like a flower that
opens the sweeter and fresher after the storm.

"Is it the mild air, or the spring flowers?" I asked one afternoon, as
we drove through the Southern woods, along a narrow deserted road that
smelt of the budding pines.

"Neither, Ben, it is you," she replied. "I have had you all these
months. Without that I could not have lived."

"You have had me," I answered, "ever since the first minute I saw your
face. You have had me always."

"Not always. During those years of your great success I thought I had
lost you."

"How could you, Sally, when it was all for you, and you knew it?"

"It may have been for me in the beginning, but success, when it came,
crowded me out. It left me no room. That's why I didn't really mind the
failure, dear, and the poverty--that's why I don't now really mind this
burden of debt. Success took you away from me, failure brings you the
closer. And when you go from me, Ben, there's something in me, I don't
know what--something, like Aunt Matoaca in my blood--that rises up and
rebels. If things had gone on like that, if you hadn't come back, I
should have grown hard and indifferent. I should have found some other
interest."

"Some other interest?" I repeated, while my heart throbbed as if a spasm
of memory contracted it.

"Oh, of course, I don't know now just what I mean--but when I look back,
I realise that I couldn't have stood many years like that with nothing
to fill them. I'd have done something desperate, if it was only going
over gates after Bonny. There's one thing they taught me, though, Ben,"
she added, "and that is that poor Aunt Matoaca was right."

"Right in what, Sally?"

"Right in believing that women must have larger lives--that they mustn't
be expected to feed always upon their hearts. You tell them to let love
fill their lives, and then when the lives are swept bare and clean of
everything else, in place of love you leave mere vacancy--just mere
vacancy and nothing but that. How can they fill their lives with love
when love isn't there--when it's off in the stock market or the
railroad, or wherever its practical affairs may be?"

"But it comes back in the evening."

"Yes, it comes back in the evening and falls asleep over its cigar."

"Well, you've got me now