said.

But presently she propped herself up on one elbow and looked over at him
rather thoughtfully. "Of course it's none of it new to you," she
said--"not the silly little things I've been talking about, nor the
things we do together--oh, the dinners, and the dances, and the operas.
Do you sort of--wish I'd get tired of it? Is it a dreadful bore to you?"

"So long as it doesn't bore you," he said; "so long as you go
on--shining the way you do over it, and I am where I can see you
shine"--he got out of his bed, sat down on the edge of hers, and took
both her hands--"so long as it's like that, you wonder," he said, "well,
the dinners and the operas and all that may be piffle, but I shall be
blind to the fact."

She kissed his hands and told him contentedly that he was a darling.
But, after a moment's silence, a little frown puckered her eyebrows and
she asked him what he was so solemn about.

Well, he had told her the truth. The edge of excitement in his voice
would have carried the irresistible conviction to anybody, that the
thing he had said was, without reserve, the very thing he meant. But
precisely as he said it, as if, indeed, the thing that he had said were
the detonating charge that fires the shell, he felt the impact, away
down in the inner depths of him, of a realization that he was not the
same man he had been six months ago. Not the man who had tramped
impatiently back and forth across Frederica's drawing-room, expounding
his ideals of space and leisure--open, wind-swept space, for the free
range of a hard, clean, athletic mind. Not the man who despised the
clutter of expensive junk--"so many things to have and to do, that one
couldn't turn around for fear of breaking something." That man would
have derided the possibility that he could ever say this thing that he,
still Rodney Aldrich, had just said to Rose--and meant.

To that man, the priceless hour of the day had always been precisely
this one, the first waking hour, when his mind, in the enjoyment of a
sort of clairvoyant limpidity, had been wont to challenge its stiffest
problems, wrestle with them, and whether triumphant or not, despatch him
to his office avid for the day's work and strides ahead of where he had
left it the night before.

He spent that hour very differently now. He spent all his hours, even
the formal working ones, differently. And the terrifying thing was that
he hadn't resisted the change, hadn't wanted to resist, didn't want