; more perhaps that our whole thought about life
is to live it so that there won't be anything to pay. We have to manage
to add things up like a column of figures with nothing to carry.
Perhaps that's why we get so little out of it."

"Don't you?"--he was genuinely surprised, "get anything out of it, I
mean."

"Oh, but I'm a selfish beast, I suppose! I want more--more!" They swung
as she spoke into a broad beam of yellow light raying out from the
library window, and he saw by it that with the word she flung out her
arms with a lovely upward motion that lifted his mood to the crest of
audacity.

"If you keep on looking like that," Peter assured her, "you'll get it."
He was struck dumb immediately after with apprehension. It sounded
daring, like a thing said in a book; but she took it as it came lightly
off the tip of his impulse, laughing. "Yes ... the great difficulty is
choosing which of so many things one really wants." They walked on then
in silence, the air darkling after the sudden shaft of illumination, the
light folds of her scarf brushing his sleeve. Peter was considering how
he might say, without precipitation, how suddenly she had limited and
defined all the things that he wanted by expressing them so perfectly
in herself, when she interrupted him.

"There's our moth again," she pointed; "he settles it by taking all of
them. It's a possibility denied to us."

"Even he," Peter insisted, "has to reckon with such incidents as my
dropping on him just now. I might have wanted him for a collection."

"Oh, if he takes us into account it must be as men used to think of the
gods walking." Suddenly the familiar beds and hedges widened for Peter;
they stretched warm and tender to the borders of youth and the unmatched
Wonder.... It was so they had talked when they walked together in the
Garden which was about the House....

For some time after Miss Goodward left him Peter remained walking up and
down, thinking of many things and unable to think of them clearly
because of a pleasant blur of excitement in his brain. As he came
finally back to the house he heard the Lessings talking from behind one
of the open windows.

"My word, that car was never out of the shop before," Julian was saying.
"He's a _goner!_"

"And that lovely, dusty, brown colour that goes so well with her hair!
Who would have thought Peter would be so noticing."

"It couldn't have cost him a cent under seven thousand." Julian was
certain, "an