t she wanted. The effect of seeing some
one so hard, so clear, so alien, was much as if, a gracefully moulded
but fragile earthenware pot, she had suddenly, while floating down the
stream, found herself crashing against the bronze vessel of the fable.

A corrective to this morbid state of mind came to her with the evening
post, and in the form of a thick letter bearing the Boston postmark.
Franklin Winslow Kane had not occurred to Althea as an alternative to
the various forms of dignified extinction with which her imagination had
been occupied that afternoon. Franklin often occurred to her as a
solace, but he never occurred to her as an escape.

He was a young man of very homespun extraction, who hovered in Boston on
the ambiguous verge between the social and the scholastic worlds; the
sort of young man whom one asked to tea rather than to dinner. He was an
earnest student, and was attached to the university by an official,
though unimportant, tie. A physicist, and, in his own sober way, with
something of a reputation, he was profoundly involved in theories that
dealt with the smallest things and the largest--molecules and the
formation of universes.

He had first proposed to Althea when she was eighteen. She was now
thirty-three, and for all these years Franklin had proposed to her on
every occasion that offered itself. He was deeply, yet calmly,
determinedly, yet ever so patiently, in love with her; and while other
more eligible and more easily consoled aspirants had drifted away and
got married and become absorbed in their growing families, Franklin
alone remained admirably faithful. She had never given him any grounds
for expecting that she might some day marry him, yet he evidently found
it impossible to marry anybody else. This was the touching fact about
Franklin, the one bright point, as it were, in his singularly colourless
personality. His fidelity was like a fleck of orange on the wing of some
grey, unobtrusive moth; it made him visible.

Althea's compassionate friendship seemed to sustain him sufficiently on
his way; he did not pine or protest, though he punctually requested. He
frequently appeared and he indefatigably wrote, and his long constancy,
the unemotional trust and closeness of their intimacy, made him seem
less a lover than the American husband of tradition, devoted and
uncomplaining, who had given up hoping that his wife would ever come
home and live with him.

Althea rather resented this as