adjusted her position so as to make his leaning on her even
easier. She brought a warm cover safe-guardingly around him.

"Poor Geraldino!" she pitied him in the lonely past.

"Then do you remember the first time I went to see you," he asked, "and
you introduced me, dearest woman, room by room, to the somewhat gruesome
mysteries of your house? You walked before me holding a lamp. In the
ball-room, hazy with vastness, you held the lamp high, like a torch. And
I had a vision of you as America again, or Liberty, or Something,
lighting the way for me.... But I treated the fancy as one treats
fancies. I did not in the least intend to cultivate the acquaintance
begun with your picking me up by the loose skin of the neck and plumping
me down on the little seat of your victoria."

"Why--Gerald!" she drawled in a tone of reproach purposely funny.
"Didn't you want to come?"

"I wanted _not_ to come!" he answered, with normal spirit. "But you
kept saying Jump in. When a lady has said Jump in three times it acts
like a spell, a man has got to jump."

"But when it came to the hot bread and syrup, brother, you know you were
glad to be there. You kept your superior look, but you ate all I
buttered for you. It did me good to see you."

"Yes," he grew dreamy again, "it took me back. It took me back to so
many things I had nearly forgotten. And when at the end of the evening I
was leaving, do you remember, Aurora, wrapping in paper some pieces of
maple-sugar and forcing me to take them home in my pocket? I felt
absurdly like a little boy and again you seemed like big America;
something exhaled from you that made me think of slanting silver-gray
roofs and the New England spring of appleblossoms and warbling robins;
yes, and of October foliage intolerably bright, and Fourth of July
celebrations. Not things I dote on, exactly, but things I was born to,
and restful to me after my years of chasing what is not to be caught,
wanting what is not to be had, seeking all the time to adjust myself, to
adjust myself, to the harshness of life, the treachery, the
unaccountability, the relentlessness--restful as this heavenly shoulder,
on which I have wished how many hundred times to lay my head like this
and not move again, or speak again, or have anything ever change.
Aurora, don't say a word, dear. Particularly, kindest Aurora, don't make
any of your little jokes. Keep perfectly still, like a good darling, and
let me forget everything except wh