med to fall into a train of thought. "It would have
been rash and unwise," she said at the end of a meditation. "What he had
was altogether insufficient."

Ann Veronica looked at the mildly pensive gray eyes and the comfortable,
rather refined face with a penetrating curiosity. Presently her aunt
sighed deeply and looked at the clock. "Time for my Patience," she said.
She got up, put the neat cuffs she had made into her work-basket,
and went to the bureau for the little cards in the morocco case. Ann
Veronica jumped up to get her the card-table. "I haven't seen the new
Patience, dear," she said. "May I sit beside you?"

"It's a very difficult one," said her aunt. "Perhaps you will help me
shuffle?"

Ann Veronica did, and also assisted nimbly with the arrangements of the
rows of eight with which the struggle began. Then she sat watching the
play, sometimes offering a helpful suggestion, sometimes letting her
attention wander to the smoothly shining arms she had folded across her
knees just below the edge of the table. She was feeling extraordinarily
well that night, so that the sense of her body was a deep delight, a
realization of a gentle warmth and strength and elastic firmness. Then
she glanced at the cards again, over which her aunt's many-ringed hand
played, and then at the rather weak, rather plump face that surveyed its
operations.

It came to Ann Veronica that life was wonderful beyond measure. It
seemed incredible that she and her aunt were, indeed, creatures of the
same blood, only by a birth or so different beings, and part of that
same broad interlacing stream of human life that has invented the fauns
and nymphs, Astarte, Aphrodite, Freya, and all the twining beauty of
the gods. The love-songs of all the ages were singing in her blood, the
scent of night stock from the garden filled the air, and the moths that
beat upon the closed frames of the window next the lamp set her mind
dreaming of kisses in the dusk. Yet her aunt, with a ringed hand
flitting to her lips and a puzzled, worried look in her eyes, deaf
to all this riot of warmth and flitting desire, was playing
Patience--playing Patience, as if Dionysius and her curate had died
together. A faint buzz above the ceiling witnessed that petrography,
too, was active. Gray and tranquil world! Amazing, passionless world! A
world in which days without meaning, days in which "we don't want things
to happen" followed days without meaning--until the last thing