and the fine line of her
chin, and that she also has comprehended this, and, wishing to
look still more bewitching, discards her furs at the risk of
taking cold. So you hold your peace, and try to look as if you
had not thought it out.

This theory is satisfactory except that it does not account for
the absence of the muff. Ah, well, there must always be a mystery
somewhere! Mystery is a part of enchantment.

Manual labor is best. Your heart can sing and your mind can dream
while your hands are working. You could not have a singing heart
and a dreaming mind all day if you had to scheme out dollars,
or if you had to add columns of figures. Those things take your
attention. You cannot be thinking of your friend while you write
letters beginning "Yours of the 17th inst. rec'd and contents
duly noted." But to work with your hands all day, thinking and
singing, and then, after nightfall, to hear the ineffable kindness
of your friend's greeting--always there--for you! Who would wake
from such a dream as this?

Dawn and the sea--music in moonlit gardens--nightingales
serenading through almond-groves in bloom--what could bring such
things into the city's turmoil? Yet they are here, and roses
blossom in the soot. That is what it means not to be alone!
That is what a friend gives you!

Having thus demonstrated that he was about twenty-five and had formed a
somewhat indefinite definition of friendship, but one entirely his own
(and perhaps Mary's) Bibbs went to bed, and was the only Sheridan to
sleep soundly through the night and to wake at dawn with a light heart.

His cheerfulness was vaguely diminished by the troublous state of
affairs of his family. He had recognized his condition when he wrote,
"Who would wake from such a dream as this?" Bibbs was a sympathetic
person, easily touched, but he was indeed living in a dream, and all
things outside of it were veiled and remote--for that is the way of
youth in a dream. And Bibbs, who had never before been of any age,
either old or young, had come to his youth at last.

He went whistling from the house before even his father had come
down-stairs. There was a fog outdoors, saturated with a fine powder of
soot, and though Bibbs noticed absently the dim shape of an automobile
at the curb before Roscoe's house, he did not recognize it as Dr.
Gurney's, but went cheerily on his way through the dingy mist.