ion was her surrender to
those particular qualities which Roger Adams did not represent. Here, at
this approaching crisis in her experience, it might have been supposed
that her sense of humour would have lent something of its brilliance as
a safeguard, but the weakness of her temperament lay in the very fact
that her humour entered only into those situations where it could
ornament without modifying the actual conditions of thought--that she
devoted to her passion for Kemper, as to the other merely temporary
phenomena of the senses, a large intensity of outlook which only the
eternal could support with dignity.

Her gaze dropped back from the heights, and he felt that she became less
elusive and more human.

"I've thought of you so often and so much," she remarked with her smile
of cordial sweetness.

"Not so often as I've thought of you." He laid, as he spoke, a folded
paper upon the desk, "There's an English review of the poems. It's
rather good so I thought you might care to see it."

She unfolded the paper; then pushed it from her with an indifferent
gesture. "It seems so long ago I can hardly believe I wrote them," she
returned, conscious as she uttered the mere ordinary words of a subdued
yet singularly vivid excitement, which seemed the softer mental radiance
left by an illumination which was past.

"I wonder why it should seem long to you," said Adams slowly. "I
remember you used to complain that one was obliged to fly through phases
of thought in order to test them all."

"I'm not sure that I want to test them all now," she replied. "When one
gets to a good place one would better stop and rest."

"Then you are in a good place?" he asked, looking at her intently from
his short-sighted eyes, which appeared to contract and narrow since he
had taken off his glasses.

"I don't know," she evaded the question with a smile, "but if I am, I
warn you, I shall stand still and rest."

He laughed softly. "I dare say you're right, if there's such a state as
rest on the earth," he answered.

The cheerful sound of his voice brought the tears suddenly to her eyes,
and she remembered a man whom she had once seen in a hospital, smiling
after a frightful accident through which he had passed.

"Are you yourself so tired?" she asked.

"I?" he shook his head. "Oh, I was using the glittering generalities
again."

"And yet you seldom take even the smallest of vacations," she insisted.

"One doesn't need it when one i