ou. What if you are, when it's life as we feel it now, such
a flood of it, every instant brimming with it? Neale," she turned to him
with a sudden idea, "do you remember how Victor Hugo's 'Waterloo'
begins?"

"I should say not!" he returned promptly. "You forget I got all the
French I know in an American university."

"Well, I went to college in America, myself!"

"I bet it wasn't there you learned anything about Victor Hugo's poetry,"
he surmised skeptically. "Well, how does it begin, anyhow, and what's it
got to do with us?"

The girl was as unamused as he at his certainty that it had something to
do with them, or she would not have mentioned it. She explained, "It's
not a famous line at all, nothing I ever heard anybody else admire. We
had to learn the poem by heart, when I was a little girl and went to
school in Bayonne. It starts out,

'Waterloo, Waterloo, morne plaine
Comme une onde qui bout dans une urne trop pleine,'

And that second line always stuck in my head for the picture it made. I
could see it, so vividly, an urn boiling over with the great gush of
water springing up in it. It gave me a feeling, inside, a real physical
feeling, I mean. I wanted, oh so awfully, sometime to be so filled with
some emotion, something great and fine, that I would be an urn too full,
gushing up in a great flooding rush. I could see the smooth, thick curl
of the water surging up and out!"

She stopped to look at him and exclaim, "Why, you're listening! You're
interested. Neale, I believe you are the only person in the world who
can really pay attention to what somebody else says. Everybody else just
goes on thinking his own thoughts."

He smiled at this fancy, and said, "Go on."

"Well, I don't know whether that feeling was already in me, waiting for
something to express it, or whether that phrase in the poem started it.
But it was, for ever so long, the most important thing in the world to
me. I was about fourteen years old then, and of course, being a good
deal with Catholics, I thought probably it was religious ecstasy that
was going to be the great flood that would brim my cup full. I used to
go up the hill in Bayonne to the Cathedral every day and stay there for
hours, trying to work up an ecstasy. I managed nearly to faint away once
or twice, which was _some_thing of course. But I couldn't feel that
great tide I'd dreamed of. And then, little by little . . . oh, lots of
things came between the idea an