score or two of other bizarre titles
they had made for things or for localities, with the instinct of so
embalming a perfect recollection. And each had certain tricks of
speech, of course, as have all human beings, and these two, so living
in each other, caught all these, and mocked and gibed and imitated,
until there was little difference in their pronunciations. To some one
overhearing them they might have been deemed as of unsound mind, though
they were only talking in love's volapuk.

They resembled each other, these two beings, as nearly in bodily
fancies as in other ways. Each, for instance, was a great water lover,
each addicted to the bath and perfumes, he perhaps because of his long
gymnasium training, and she from the instinct of all purity which
appertains to all women worth the owning.

One afternoon they had fled from the city and were walking on the
beach, beside the lake, with no one near them. For a mile in either
direction, they could look up and down and see that no intruder was in
sight. He sent flat stones skipping and galloping over the waves with
some whirling trick of underthrow, and tried to teach her the device of
it, and they sat upon the sand and ate the luncheon he had secured
preparatory to this great excursion, a luncheon devised with great
skill by a great caterer, and packed in a paper box which would go in a
coat-pocket, and they talked of many things and delighted in being
together, and alone. And he, floundering in the sand, must needs get
much of it inside his shoe. And then this reckless person, having
removed the shoe to rid himself of the sand, must needs step in a
treacherous spot and wet his stocking dismally. And the sensible thing
to do was to remove the stocking and dry it in the sun.

There should be, so far as its relation to society is concerned, no
difference between the human hand and the human foot, but, somehow, the
average man is not, as a rule, ready to exhibit his bare feet
carelessly to the one woman, and to the average woman a similar
revelation would seem a thing indelicate; but these two were not of the
common sort. Harlson pulled off his stocking as carefully as he would
have done a glove, and spread it on the sand where it might dry, and,
laughing at his disaster, he dabbled with his foot in the sand.

She looked at him curiously. She looked at the foot, too, being a
woman, and this being the man above all others to her, and then she
laughed out