Book + 

II + 

VI + 

“It’s here,” Upton said. + 

Vance had jokingly offered to accompany Upton to the Willows, and help him to dust Miss Lorburn’s rooms, so that Laura Lou should not miss the movies. But Laura Lou, flushing crimson, replied in a frightened whisper that it wasn’t true, that she wanted to go to the Willows, that she always did go when her mother couldn’t⁠—so Vance hired a bicycle at a nearby garage, and the three cousins set out. + 

Upton stopped before a padlocked gate overhung with trees. A deep green lane led up to it, so rutty and grass-grown that the cousins, jumping from their bicycles, climbed it on foot. Upton pulled out a key, unlocked the padlock of the gate, and led the way in, followed by Vance and Laura Lou. The house, which was painted a dark brown, stood at the end of a short grass-grown drive, its front so veiled in the showering gold-green foliage of two ancient weeping willows that Vance could only catch, here and there, a hint of a steep roof, a jutting balcony, an aspiring turret. The façade, thus seen in trembling glimpses, as if it were as fluid as the trees, suggested vastness, fantasy, and secrecy. Green slopes of unmown grass, and heavy shrubberies of unpruned syringa and lilac, surrounded it; and beyond the view was closed in on all sides by trees and more trees. “An old house⁠—this is the way an old house looks!” Vance thought. + 

The three walked up the drive, their steps muffled by the long grass and clover which had pushed up through the gravel. When the front of the house was before them, disengaged from the fluctuating veil of willows, Vance saw that it was smaller than he had expected; but the air of fantasy and mystery remained. Everything about the front was irregular, but with an irregularity unfamiliar to him. The shuttered windows were very tall and narrow, and narrow too the balconies, which projected at odd angles, supported by ornate wooden brackets. One corner of the house rose into a tower with a high shingled roof, and arched windows which seemed to simulate the openings in a belfry. A sort of sloping roof over the front door also rested on elaborately ornamented brackets, and on each side of the steps was a large urn of fluted iron painted to imitate stone, in which some half-dead geraniums languished. + 

While Upton unlocked the front door and went in with his sister, Vance wandered around to the other side of the building. Here a still stranger spectacle awaited him. An arcaded verandah ran across this front, and all about it, and reaching out above it from bracket to bracket, from balcony to balcony, a wistaria with huge distorted branches like rheumatic arms lifted itself to the eaves, festooning, as it mounted, every projecting point with long lilac fringes⁠—as if, Vance thought, a flock of very old monkeys had been ordered to climb up and decorate the house front in celebration of some august arrival. He had never seen so prodigal a flowering, or a plant so crippled and ancient; and for a while it took his attention from the house. But not for long. To bear so old a climber on its front, the house must be still older; and its age, its mystery, its reserve, laid a weight on his heart. He remembered once, at Euphoria, waking in the night⁠—a thing which seldom happened to him⁠—and hearing the bell of the Roman Catholic church slowly and solemnly toll the hour. He saw the church every day on his way to school: a narrow-fronted red brick building with sandstone trim, and a sandstone cross over the gable; and though he had heard the bell time and time again its note had never struck him. But sounding thus through the hush of the night, alone awake in the sleeping town, it spoke to his wakefulness with a shock of mystery. + 

The same feeling came over him as he stood in the long grass before the abandoned house. He felt in the age and the emptiness of it something of the church bell’s haunting sonority⁠—as if it kept in its mute walls a voice as secret and compelling. If only he had known how to pull the rope and start the clapper swinging! + 

As he stood there the shutters were thrown back from one of the windows on the ground floor, and Upton leaned out to hail him. “Hullo! Laura Lou thought the ghosts had got you.” + 

“They had⁠—almost,” Vance laughed. He went up to the window and swung himself into the room. Upton had opened all the shutters, and the afternoon light flowed softly in. The room was not large, but its ceiling was high, with a dim cobwebby cornice. On the floor was a carpet with a design of large flower wreaths and bows and loops of faded green. The mantelpiece, richly carved, was surmounted by a mirror reaching to the ceiling; and here and there stood pieces of furniture of a polished black wood inlaid with patterns of ivory or metal. There were tall vases on mantel and table, their flanks painted with landscapes in medallion, or garlanded with heavy wreathes like those on the carpet. On the mantelpiece Vance noticed a round-faced clock guarded by an old man in bronze with a scythe and an hourglass; and stiffly ranged about the room were armchairs and small seats covered with a pale material slit and tattered with age. As Vance stood looking at it all Laura Lou appeared from another room. A long apron covered her from chin to knees, and she had tied a towel about her head, and carried a large feather duster. + 

“This is where she always sat,” she whispered to Vance, signalling to him to follow. The room she led him into was more sombre than the other, partly because the wistaria had stretched a long drapery across one of the windows, partly because the walls were dark and had tall heavy bookcases against them. In a bow window stood a table with a velvet table cover trailing its faded folds and moth-eaten fringes on the floor. It bore a monumental inkstand, a bronze lamp with a globe of engraved glass, a work basket, and two or three books. But what startled Vance, and made him, in his surprise, forget everything else, was the fact that one of the books lay open, and that across the page was a small pair of oddly shaped spectacles in a thin gold mounting. It looked as if someone had been reading there a few minutes before, and, disturbed by the sound of steps, had dropped the book and spectacles and glided out of sight. Vance remembered Laura Lou’s fear of ghosts, and glanced about him half apprehensively, as if the reader of that book, the wearer of those spectacles, might be peering at them from some shadowy corner of the room. + 

As he looked his eye fell on a picture hanging above the mantelpiece⁠—a crayon drawing, he thought it must be, in a bossy and ponderous gilt frame. It was the portrait of a middle-aged woman, seen in three-quarter length. She leaned on a table with a heavy velvet cover, bearing an inkstand and some books⁠—the very table and the very inkstand, Vance perceived, on which the picture itself looked down. And the lady, past a doubt, was Miss Lorburn: Miss Lorburn in her thoughtful middle age. She had dark hair, parted in heavy folds above a wide meditative forehead touched with highlights in chalk. Her face was long and melancholy. The lappets of her lace cap fell on her shoulders, and her thin arms emerged from the wide sleeves of a dark jacket, with undersleeves of white lawn also picked out in chalk. + 

The peculiar dress, the sad face, resembled nothing Vance had ever seen; but instantly he felt their intimate relation to all that was peculiar and unfamiliar in the house. The past⁠—they all belonged to the past, this woman and her house, to the same past, a past of their own, a past so remote from anything in Vance Weston’s experience that it took its place in the pages of history anywhere in the dark Unknown before Euphoria was. He continued to gaze up at the sad woman, who looked down on him with large full-orbed eyes, as if it were she who had just dropped her book and spectacles, and reascended to her frame as he came in. + 

Without surprise he heard Laura Lou say behind him: “This is the book she was reading when she died. Mr. Lorburn⁠—that’s her nephew⁠—won’t let us touch anything in this room, not even to dust it. We have to dust the things without moving them.” + 

He had never heard Laura Lou make such a long speech; but he had no ears for it. He nodded, and she tiptoed away with her duster. Far off, down the inlaid wooden floors, he heard Upton clumping about in his heavy gardening shoes, opening other doors and shutters. Laura Lou called to him, and their voices receded together to some distant part of the house. + 

Vance stood alone in Miss Lorburn’s library. He had never been in a private library before; he hardly knew that collections of books existed as personal possessions, outside of colleges and other public institutions. And all these books had been a woman’s, had been this Miss Lorburn’s, and she had sat among them, lived among them, died reading them⁠—reading the very one on the table at his elbow! It all seemed part of the incomprehensible past to which she and the house belonged, a past so remote, so full of elusive mystery, that Vance’s first thought was: “Why wasn’t I ever told about the Past before?” + 

He turned from the portrait and looked about the room, trying vainly to picture what this woman’s life had been, in her solemn high-ceilinged house, alone among her books. He thought of her on winter evenings, sitting at this table, beside the oil lamp with the engraved globe, her queer little spectacles on that long grave nose, poring, poring over the pages, while the wind wailed down the chimney and the snow piled itself up on the lawns. And on summer evenings she sat here too, probably⁠—he could not picture her out of doors; sat here in a slanting light, like that now falling through the wistaria fringes, and leaned her sad head on her hand, and read and read.⁠ ⁠… + 

His eyes wandered from the close rows of books on the shelves to the one lying open on the table. That was the book she had been reading when she died⁠—died as a very old woman, and yet so incalculably long ago. Vance moved to the table, and bent over the open page. It was yellow, and blotched with dampness: the type was queer too, different from any that was familiar to him. He read: + 

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan⁠—” + 

Oh, what beautiful, what incredible words! What did they mean? But what did it matter what they meant? Or whether they meant anything but their own unutterable music? Vance dropped down into the high-backed armchair by the table, pushed the spectacles away from the page, and read on. + 

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan + 

A stately pleasure-dome decree: + 

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran + 

Through caverns measureless to man, + 

Down to a sunless sea⁠ ⁠…” + 

It was a new music, a music utterly unknown to him, but to which the hidden chords of his soul at once vibrated. It was something for him⁠—something that intimately belonged to him. What had he ever known of poetry before? His mind’s eye ran over the verse he had been nurtured on: James Whitcomb Riley, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Bliss Carman’s Songs from Vagabondia; hackneyed old “pieces” from Whittier and Longfellow, in the Sixth Reader; Lowell’s “Ode”⁠—there were fine bits in that⁠—Whitman’s “Pioneers” (good, too, but rather jiggy); and then the new stuff he had got glimpses of here and there in the magazines, in one or two of the “highbrow” reviews (but these hardly ever came his way), and in his college paper. And he had taken it for granted that he had covered the field of poetry.⁠ ⁠… + 

And now⁠—this! But this was poetry, this was what his soul had been alight for, this was what the word Poetry meant, the word which always made wings rustle in him when he read it. He sat with his head between his hands, reading on, passionately, absorbedly, his whole being swept away on that mighty current. He remembered that, as he looked up at the house from without, he had compared it to a long-silent bell, and had longed to set its sonorous waves in motion. And behold, the bell was swinging and clanging all about him now, enveloping him in great undulation of sound like the undulations of a summer sea. + 

But for that inner music the house was utterly silent. The steps and voices of his cousins had died away. The very afternoon light seemed to lie arrested on the page. He seemed to have been sitting there a long time, in this unmoving ecstasy, when something stirred near him, and raising his head he saw a girl standing in the door and looking at him. + 

“Oh, who wrote this?” he exclaimed breathlessly, pointing to the book. + 

It was only after he had asked the question, after his voice had sounded aloud in his own ears, that he became conscious of her presence as of something alien, substantial, outside of his own mind, a part of the forgotten world of reality. Then he saw that she was young, tall, and pale, with dark hair banded close under her drooping hat. There was something about her, he saw also, that fitted into the scene, seemed to mark her as a part of it, though he was instantly aware of her being so young, not much older than himself, he imagined. But what were time and space at that moment? + 

Without surprise, but merely smiling a little, she came up and bent over the book, narrowing her lids slightly in the way of the shortsighted. “That? Why⁠—but Coleridge, of course!” She chanted softly after him: + 

“ ‘Through caverns measureless to man, + 

Down to a sunless sea.’ ” + 

Vance sat looking up at her. He had heard the “of course,” but without heeding it. All he cared for was that she had given him the man’s name⁠—the man who had imagined that. His brain was reeling as if he were drunk. He had not thought of moving from his chair, of naming himself to the newcomer, or asking her name. + 

“Did he write a lot more?” he asked. + 

She stood by the table, her hands lightly resting on it, and looked down on him with a faint smile. “Yes, he did, worse luck.” + 

“Worse luck⁠—?” + 

“Because so very little was of that quality.” Without taking the book from him, or looking at the page, she went on: + 

“ ‘But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted + 

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover⁠ ⁠…’ ” + 

Vance listened enthralled. Her rich voice, modelling the words, gave them a new relief. He was half aware that her way of speaking was unlike any he had ever heard, but too much under the spell of what she was saying to separate it from the quality of her utterance. He commanded imperiously: “Go on⁠—” and she continued, leaning slightly toward him and dropping the petal-like syllables with soft deliberation: + 

“ ‘A damsel with a dulcimer + 

In a vision once I saw⁠ ⁠…’ ” + 

Vance leaned back and listened with deep-drawn breath and lowered lids. “Honeydew⁠ ⁠… honeydew⁠ ⁠…” he murmured as she ended, half consciously applying the epithet to her voice. + 

She dropped down into a chair beside him and looked at him thoughtfully. “It’s queer⁠—your caring as much as that about poetry, and never having come across this.” + 

He flushed up, and for the first time looked at her with full awareness of her presence as a stranger, and an intruder on his dream. The look confirmed him in the impression that she was very young, though probably two or three years older than himself. But it might be only her tallness and self-assurance which made him think her older. She had dark gray eyes, deeply lashed, and features somewhat too long and thin in repose, but rounded and illumined by a smile which flashed across her face in sudden sympathy or amusement. Vance detected amusement now, and answered curtly: “I daresay if you knew me you’d think there was a whole lot of things I’d never come across.” + 

“I daresay,” she agreed complaisantly. “But I might also remember that you were probably too young even to have heard of ‘The Ancient Mariner.’ ” + 

“Coleridge? The ‘Ancient Mariner’ one? Was it the same who wrote this?” + 

She nodded. “You know ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ then? Sixth Reader, I suppose⁠—or college course?” She laughed a little. “So culture comes.” + 

He interrupted angrily: “What have I said to make you laugh?” + 

“Nothing. I wasn’t laughing at you, but at the intelligence of our national educators⁠—no, educationists, I think they call themselves nowadays⁠—who manage to take the bloom off our greatest treasures by giving them to young savages to maul. I see, for instance, that they’ve spoilt ‘The Ancient Mariner’ for you.” She continued to scrutinize him thoughtfully. “You’re not one of the young savages⁠—but the bloom has been rubbed off a good many things for you in that way, hasn’t it?” + 

“Well, yes⁠—some.” + 

“Not that it matters⁠—for you. You’ll get it back. But I do so hate to think of mutilated beauty.” + 

Mutilated beauty! How rich the words sounded on her lips⁠—as if she swept the rubbish of the centuries from some broken statue, noble in its ruin! Vance continued to look at her, absently yet intently. He had drawn her into his dream. + 

But she stood up and pushed her chair aside. “And now,” she said gaily, in a new voice, a light and humorous one, “perhaps you’ll tell me who you are and how you got here.” + 

The question seemed to come to him from so far off that he stared at her perplexedly before answering. “I⁠—oh, I’m just the Tracys’ cousin. I’m staying at their house. They’re somewhere round dusting the other rooms.” + 

Her look became more friendly. “Oh, you’re the cousin from the West, who’s been ill and has come to Paul’s Landing for a change? Mrs. Tracy told me about you⁠—only I can’t remember your name.” + 

“Vance Weston.” + 

“Mine’s Héloïse Spear. They call me Halo. The name and the nickname are both ridiculous.” She held out her hand. “And you’ve come to call on poor old Cousin Elinor? It’s an attention she doesn’t often receive from her own family.” She glanced about the room. “I haven’t been here in an age⁠—I don’t know what made me come today. At least I didn’t⁠—” she broke off with one of her fugitive smiles, letting her eyes rest on his and then turning away from him to inspect the books. “Some day,” she said, as if to herself, “I must have the courage to take these down and give them a good cleaning.” + 

Vance stood up also, beginning to speak eagerly. “Could I come and help you when you do⁠—I mean with the books? I’d⁠—I’d like it first-rate.” + 

She turned back to him, her eyes brimming with banter and coquetry. “On account of the books?” + 

But he was too deep in his own emotion to heed the challenge. He answered simply: “I don’t often get a chance at this kind.” His eyes followed hers about the crowded shelves. “I’ve never before been in a house with a library⁠—a real library like this.” + 

She gave a little shrug. “Oh, it’s a funny library, antiquated, like the house. But Cousin Elinor does seem to have cared for good poetry. When other ladies were reading ‘Friendship’s Garland’ she chose Coleridge.” + 

His gaze returned perplexed to her face. “Why do you call it a funny library?” + 

“Well, it’s not exactly up-to-date. I suppose it’s a fairly good specimen of what used to be called a ‘gentleman’s library’ in my great-grandfather’s time. With additions, naturally, from each generation. Cousin Elinor must have bought a good many books herself.” She looked about her critically. “After all,” she concluded with a smile, “the Willows is getting to have an atmosphere.” + 

Vance listened, still perplexed. Her allusions escaped him⁠—her smile was unintelligible⁠—but he gathered that she attached no very great importance to the house, or to the books, and he dimly resented this air of taking for granted what to him was the revelation of an unknown world. + 

Involuntarily he lowered his voice. “It’s the first time I’ve ever been in a very old house,” he said, as if announcing something of importance. + 

“A very old house? The Willows?” The idea seemed a new one to her. “Well⁠—after all, everything is relative, as what’s-his-name said.” + 

“Don’t you call it a very old house?” + 

She wrinkled her dark eyebrows in an effort of memory. “Let me see. Father’s great-uncle Ambrose Lorburn built it, I believe. When would that be?” She began to count on her fingers. “Say about 1830. Well, that does make it very nearly an old house for America, doesn’t it? Almost a hundred years!” + 

“And the same folks always lived in it?” + 

“Oh, of course.” She seemed surprised at the question. “The present owner is the first absentee⁠—poor Cousin Tom! He thinks he ought to live here, but he says he can’t come up to scratch. So he makes up for it by keeping everything unchanged.” Again she surveyed the plaintive shadowy room. “I suppose,” she mused, “the house will be getting to have an archaeological interest of its own before long. It must be one of the best specimens of Hudson River Bracketed that are left, even in our ultraconservative neighbourhood.” + 

To Vance she seemed still to be speaking another language, of which he caught only an occasional phrase, and even that but half comprehensible. + 

“Hudson River Bracketed?” he echoed. “What’s that?” + 

“Why, didn’t you know it was our indigenous style of architecture in this part of the world?” Her smile of mockery had returned, but he did not mind for he saw it was not directed against himself. “I perceive,” she continued, “that you are not familiar with the epoch-making work of A. J. Downing Esq. on Landscape Gardening in America.” She turned to the bookcases, ran her hand along a shelf, and took down a volume bound in black cloth with the title in gilt Gothic lettering. Her fingers flew from page to page, her shortsighted eyes following as swiftly. “Here⁠—here’s the place. It’s too long to read aloud; but the point is that Mr. Downing, who was the great authority of the period, sums up the principal architectural styles as the Grecian, the Chinese, the Gothic, the Tuscan or Italian villa, and⁠—Hudson River Bracketed. Unless I’m mistaken, he cites the Willows as one of the most perfect examples of Hudson River Bracketed (this was in 1842), and⁠—yes, here’s the place: ‘The seat of Ambrose Lorburn Esq., the Willows, near Paul’s Landing, Dutchess County, N.Y., is one of the most successful instances of etc., etc.⁠ ⁠… architectural elements ingeniously combined from the Chinese and the Tuscan.’ And so they were! What an eye the man had. And here’s the picture, willows and all! How lovely these old steel engravings were⁠ ⁠… and look at my great-uncle and aunt on the lawn, pointing out to each other with pride and admiration their fairly obvious copper beech⁠ ⁠… ‘one of the first ever planted in a gentleman’s grounds in the United States.’ ” + 

They bent their heads together over the engraving, which, as she said, reproduced the house exactly as Vance had just beheld it, except that the willows were then slender young trees, and the lawns mown, that striped awnings shaded the lower windows, and that a gentleman in a tall hat and a stock was calling the attention of a lady in bonnet and cashmere shawl to the celebrated copper beech. From Miss Spear’s tone Vance could not tell whether pride or mockery was uppermost in her comments on her ancestor’s achievement. But he dimly guessed that, though she might laugh at the Willows, and at what Mr. Downing said of it, she was not sorry that the house figured so honourably in his book. + 

“There,” she concluded with a laugh, “now you know what the Hudson River Bracketed style was like, and why Uncle Ambrose Lorburn was so proud of his specimen of it.” She handed him the volume, glanced at her wristwatch, and turned to nod to him from the threshold. “Gracious, how late it is! I must hunt up the Tracy children, and see how much crockery they’ve smashed.” + 

She disappeared in the spectral shadows of the drawing room, and Vance heard her heels rapping lightly across the hall, and through unknown rooms and passages beyond. He sat motionless where she had left him, his elbows propped on the table, the book still open before him, his head pressed between his hands, letting the strangeness of the place and the hour envelop him like the falling light. + 

It was dusk in the book-lined room when he was roused by Upton’s hobbledehoy tread and a tap on the shoulder. “What’s become of you? I guess you’ve been sound asleep,” his cousin challenged him. + 

Vance sat upright with a start. “No, I haven’t been asleep.” He got to his feet and looked about him. “Where’s Miss Spear?” + 

“Miss Halo? Oh, did you see her? She’s gone long ago. A gentleman friend called for her in his car. I don’t know where they went. She never stays anywhere more than five minutes.” Vance was silent, and Upton added: “Say, come along; Laura Lou’s waiting. Time to lock up.” + 

Vance reluctantly followed his cousin. As they left the house he realized that, instead of seizing the opportunity to explore every nook of it, he had sat all the afternoon in one room, and merely dreamed of what he might have seen in the others. But that was always his way: the least little fragment of fact was enough for him to transform into a palace of dreams, whereas if he tried to grasp more of it at a time it remained on his hands as so much unusable reality. + 

VII + 

Three men and two ladies were sitting on the shabby paintless verandah at Eaglewood at the end of a summer afternoon. + 

The place was full of the signs of comfortable but disorderly use. A low table was spread with tea things, a teapot of one make, cups of another, plates with fragments of stale-looking cake and cold toast. There were willow armchairs, some disabled and mended with string, but all provided with gaily striped cushions which had visibly suffered from sun and rain; there were also long deck chairs with tattered plaids or Indian blankets on them, and more cushions strewn on the floor, among a litter of magazines and newspapers. In one corner stood a tall earthen jar with branches of blossoming plum and shadbush, in another an easel with a study blocked out in charcoal, and everywhere were trails of ashes, and little accumulations of cigar and cigarette ends. + 

The low-studded old house of gray stone was throned on the mountainside so high above Paul’s Landing that those who sat on the verandah missed the dispiriting sight of the town and of the cement works below, and saw only, beyond the precipitate plunge of many-tinted forest, the great sweep of the Hudson, and the cliffs on its other shore. + 

The view from Eaglewood was famous⁠—yet visible, Héloïse Spear reflected, to none of those who habitually lived with it except herself. Her mother, she thought, had probably seen it for a while, years ago, in her first eager youth; then it had been lost in a mist of multiple preoccupations, literary, humanitarian, and domestic, from which it emerged only when visitors were led out on the verandah for the first time. “Ah, our view⁠—yes,” Mrs. Spear would then murmur, closing her handsome eyes as if to shut herself in with the unutterable, away from the importunities of spoken praise. And her guests would remain silent, too much impressed by her attitude to find the superlatives expected of them. + 

As for Mr. Spear, his daughter knew that he had simply never seen the view at all; his eyes had never been still long enough. But he had read of it in verse and prose; he talked of it with vivacity and emotion; he knew the attitude to strike, deprecating yet possessive, lighting a cigarette while the others gazed, and saying: “The poets have sung us, as you know. You remember Bryant’s ‘Eyrie’? Yes⁠—that’s the Eaglewood view. He used to stay here with my wife’s great-grandfather. And Washington Irving, in his Sketch Book. And Whitman⁠—it’s generally supposed⁠ ⁠…” And at that point Mrs. Spear would open her eyes to interject: “Really? You didn’t know that my husband knew Whitman? I always scold him for not having written down some of their wonderful talks together⁠—” + 

“Ah, Whitman was a very old man when I knew him⁠—immobilized at Camden. He never came here in my time. But from something he once said I gathered that Eaglewood undoubtedly⁠ ⁠… yes, I must really jot it all down one of these days.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Mr. Spear’s past was full of the dateless blur of the remarkable things he had not jotted down. Slim, dark, well-preserved, with his wavy grayish hair and cleverly dyed moustache, he was the type of the busy dreamer who is forever glancing at his watch, calling impatiently for timetables and calendars (two articles never to be found in the Spear household), calculating and plotting out his engagements, doubting whether there will be time to squeeze in this or that, wondering if after all it will be possible to “make it,” and then, at the end of each day, groaning as he lights his after-dinner cigar: “Devil take it, when I got up this morning I thought of a lot of rather important things I had to do⁠—and like a fool I forgot to jot them down.” It was not to be expected, Halo thought, that a man as busy as her father should ever have time to look at a sunset. + 

As for Héloïse’s brother Lorry (Lorburn, of course) who sat extended in the hollow of a canvas chair, his handsome contemptuous head tilted back, and his feet on the verandah rail, Lorry, the fool, could see the view when he chose, and out of sheer perversity and posing, wouldn’t⁠—and that was worst of all, to his sister’s thinking. “Oh, for God’s sake, Halo, don’t serve up the view again, there’s a good girl! Shan’t I ever be able to teach you not to have taste? The world’s simply dying of a surfeit of scenery⁠—an orgy of beauty. If my father would cut down some of those completely superfluous trees, and let us get a line on the chimney of the cement factory⁠ ⁠… It’s a poor little chimney, of course, but it’s got the supreme quality of ugliness. In certain lights, you know, it’s almost as ugly as the Willows⁠ ⁠… or the Parthenon, say.⁠ ⁠…” + 

But unless there were visitors present Lorry seldom got as far as the Parthenon in his monologue, because he knew his family had long since discounted his opinions about beauty, and went on thinking of other things while he was airing them⁠—even old George Frenside did nowadays, though once the boy’s paradoxes had seemed to amuse him. + 

George Frenside was the other man on the verandah. There he sat, behind his sempiternal cigar, glowering into the tender spaces of the sky as if what he saw there were an offense to the human race; yet Halo wondered if one could say of those small deep-sunk eyes, forever watchful behind their old-fashioned pince-nez, that anything they rested on escaped them. Probably not; for in certain ways he was sensitive to beauty, and not afraid of it, like Lorry. Only, to move him, it had to be beauty of man’s making, something wrung by human genius out of the stubborn elements. The sunset and the woodlands were nothing to him if they had not fed a poet or a painter⁠—a poet preferably. Frenside had often said to Halo: “No, my child; remember I’m not a vegetarian⁠—never could digest raw landscape.” But that did not mean that he did not see it, did not parcel it out into its component parts with those cool classifying eyes. George Frenside was aware of most things; little escaped him of the cosmic spectacle. Only for him the beauty of the earth was something you could take apart, catalogue, and pigeonhole, and not the enveloping harmony it was to the girl who sat beside him looking out on the sunset opalescence at their feet. + 

George Frenside was an institution at Eaglewood, and wherever else the Spears set up their tents. His short stocky figure, his brooding Socratic head, his cigar and eyeglasses, figured among Halo’s earliest recollections, and she had always seen him as she saw him now: elderly, poor, unsuccessful, and yet more masterful, more stimulating, than anyone else she had known. “A fire that warms everything but itself,” she had once defined him; but he had snapped back: “I don’t warm, I singe.” + 

Not a bad description of his relation to most people; but she, who knew him so well, knew also the communicative glow he could give out, and often wondered why it had never lit up his own path. + 

She was familiar with Frenside’s explanation: the critical faculty outweighed all others in him, and, as he had often told her, criticism won’t keep its man. He saw (he also said) the skeletons of things and people: he was a walking radiograph. God knows he didn’t want to be⁠—would rather not have had a decomposing mind. But it was the one allotted to him, and with it he had lingered on the outskirts of success, contributing fierce dissections of political and literary ideas to various newspapers and reviews, often refusing to write an article when it was asked for⁠—and especially when a good sum was offered for it⁠—and then suddenly dashing off a brilliant diatribe which no one wanted, and which came back to him from one editor after another. He had written, a good many years earlier, a brief volume of essays called Dry Points, which had had a considerable success in the limited circle of the cultivated, and been enthusiastically reviewed in England. This had produced a handsome offer from a publisher, who asked Frenside for a revolutionary book on education: a subject made to his hand. The idea delighted him, he wanted the money badly, he had never before had the offer of so large a sum; and he sat paralyzed by the completeness of the opportunity. One day he found a title which amused him⁠—The Art of Imparting Ignorance⁠—and that was the only line of the book he ever wrote. + 

“It’s one of the surest signs of genius to do your best when you’re working for money,” he told Halo. “I have only talent⁠—and the idea of doing a book to order simply benumbed me. What the devil can I do but keep on hack-writing?” But even that he did only intermittently. Nevertheless, he held jealously to his pecuniary independence, and, though he frequently accepted the hospitality of the Spears, and of a few other old friends, he was never known to have borrowed a penny of any of them, a fact which Halo Spear’s own brief experience led her to regard as unusual, and almost unaccountable. But then, she thought, there was nothing about George Frenside that wasn’t queer, even to his virtues.⁠ ⁠… + 

Her eyes wandered back to the landscape. It lay before her in the perfect beauty of a June evening: one of those evenings when twilight floats aloft in an air too pure to be penetrated by the density of darkness. What did it all mean, she wondered⁠—that there should be this beauty, so ever-varying, so soul-sufficing, so complete, and face to face with it these people who one and all would gladly have exchanged it for any one of a hundred other things; her mother for money enough to carry them to the end of the year, her father for his New York club and a bridge table, Lorry of course for money too (money was always the burning question in the Spear family), and George Frenside for good talk in a Bohemian restaurant? + 

The girl herself shared, or at least understood, the hereditary antagonism toward Eaglewood of those who lived there. To the last two generations of Lorburns Eaglewood had embodied all the things they could not do because of it. The only member of the family who idealised it (and even he only theoretically) was Mr. Spear, who had “married into” it, and still faintly glowed with the refracted honour of speaking of “our little old place on the Hudson.” + 

Old it was, for an American possession. Lorburns had lived there for considerably over two hundred years: the present house had been built in 1680. It was too long, perhaps, for Americans to live in any one place; and the worst of it was that, when they had, it became a sort of tribal obligation to go on doing so. Sell Eaglewood? Which one of them would have dared to? When Pittsburgh and Chicago fell upon the feudal Hudson, and one old property after another was bartered for a mess of pottage, the Lorburns sat apart with lifted brows, and grimly thanked Providence that Paul’s Landing was too far from New York to attract the millionaires. Even now, had fashion climbed to their solitary height it is doubtful if any of them⁠—not excepting Lorry⁠—would have dared to mention aloud the places they could have gone to, and the things they could have done, if only they had been free of Eaglewood. As it happened, no such danger threatened, for fashion had passed them by; but had the peril been imminent, Mr. Spear would have opposed it with all the force of his eloquence. + 

Mr. Spear regarded Eaglewood with the veneration of the parvenu for a recently acquired ancestor. When he married the beautiful Miss Lorburn, New York said: “He’s very clever, of course; but still, who would have expected to see a Spear at Eaglewood?” And he knew it, and was determined to show New York that a Spear could be perfectly at home even at that altitude. + 

He was himself the son of the Reverend Harold Spear, the eloquent and popular divine who for years had packed Saint Ambrose’s with New York’s most distinguished congregation. Dr. Spear, as popular out of the pulpit as in it, had married a distant cousin of the Van der Luydens, thus paving the way for his son’s more brilliant alliance; but still it required a certain courage on the part of the heiress of Eaglewood to accept a suitor whom her friends alluded to as “merely clever.” Sometimes Héloïse, thinking over the phrase (which her mother had once quoted to her in derision), smiled to note how exact it was. After all, those dull old Lorburns and their clan must have had a nice sense of nuances: her father, whom she loved and laughed at, was exactly that⁠—he was merely clever. It was perhaps because his wife belonged to the same category (though, being a Lorburn, she had never been placed in it, since a Lorburn woman might be beautiful, or masterful, or distinguished, but never anything so ambiguous as “clever”) that she had been attracted by young Spear, and had married him in spite of the family opposition. Emily Lorburn, brought up in an atmosphere of rigid social conformity, had become passionately nonconforming; her husband, educated after the strict rule of Episcopalian orthodoxy, had read Strauss and Renan in secret before going over openly to Darwin and Haeckel. The young people, dazzled by each other’s audacities, had perhaps expected, by pooling them, to form a nucleus of intellectual revolt; but the world had revolted without waiting for them. Their heresies were too mild to cause any excitement outside of their own circle, and their house, instead of being the centre of incendiarism they had imagined, was merely regarded as one where one was likely to meet agreeable people. + 

All this, though long since patent to their children, was still but dimly apprehended by Mr. and Mrs. Spear, and Halo knew that her mother secretly regarded Eaglewood, the obligations it entailed and the privations it necessitated, as the chief obstacle to the realizing of her ambitions. Mrs. Spear felt that what both she and her husband needed to produce the revolutionary effect they aimed at was a house in New York; and for years all her energies had been bent on getting it. These had been the years of Halo’s little girlhood and first youth: economical years marked by a series of snowbound winters at Eaglewood, and (whenever the place could be let) European summers in places dingily aesthetic. But in spite of these sacrifices the unequal struggle had had to be given up; the visionary house in New York had shrunk to a small flat, the flat to six weeks in a family hotel, with Eaglewood for the rest of the year; and at present, as Halo knew, her mother was anxiously calculating whether, with the growing cost of everything, and Lorry’s perpetual debts, and perpetual inability to find a job, it would not be necessary to renounce even a month in the family hotel. + 

There were times when to the girl herself Eaglewood was as much of a prison as to her elders. But the fact that it was easier for her than for her parents to get away made the being there less irksome; and besides, she loved the place for itself, instead of being proud of it for family reasons, and hating it for every other. The house depressed her, in spite of its portraits and relics, and the faded perfume of old days, because it was associated with the perpetual struggle to keep the roof dry, the ceilings patched, the furnace going, the curtains and carpets turned and darned, the taxes paid. But poverty and lack of care could not spoil what lay outside the house: the acres of neglected parkland with ancient trees widening their untrimmed domes over lawns that had lapsed into pasture, the woods beyond, murmuring and glinting with little streams, and that ever-renewed view on which the girl’s eyes never rested without the sense of inner communion which all the others had missed. + 

Ah, that view⁠ ⁠… suddenly she thought: “I believe the boy I saw down at the Willows last week has the only eyes I know that would really see it as I do⁠—”; and the thought, rousing her out of her dream, brought her to her feet with a jerk. + 

“Oh,” she exclaimed, with a cry in which amusement mingled with consternation; for she saw nearly everything in life first on the amusing side, even to her own shortcomings. + 

George Frenside lifted his head from the newspaper and turned his ironic eyeglasses on her. “What’s up?” + 

“Only that I’ve forgotten an engagement.” + 

“What? Again?” + 

She nodded contritely. “I’m a perfect beast⁠—it was simply vile of me!” She was talking to herself, not to Frenside. As for her own family, they were all too used to her frequent outbursts of compunction over forgotten engagements to let her remorse disturb their meditations. + 

For a moment she stood brooding over her latest lapse; then she turned to reenter the house. As she disappeared Mrs. Spear, roused from some inner calculation which had wrinkled her brows and sharpened the lines about her mouth, sat up to call after her in a deep wailing voice: “But Lewis Tarrant⁠—have you all forgotten Lewis Tarrant? Who’s going to fetch him from the station?” + 

Whenever Mrs. Spear emerged thus suddenly from the sea of her perplexities, her still lovely face wore a half-drowned look which made Halo feel as if one ought to give her breathing exercises and other first-aid remedies. + 

“Don’t look so upset, darling. Why should you think I’d forgotten Lewis? I’m going down presently to meet him; his train’s not due for another hour.” + 

But Lorry Spear, with an effort, had pulled himself to his feet and cast away his cigarette end. “You needn’t, Halo. I’ll go,” he said in a voice of brotherly self-sacrifice. + 

“Thanks ever so, Lorry. But don’t bother⁠—” + 

“No bother, child. I’ll call at the post at the same time, and pick up Mother’s arrowroot at the grocer’s.” + 

This evoked a languid laugh from Mr. Spear and Frenside, for the grocery at Paul’s Landing was the repository for all Mrs. Spear’s daily purchases, and whenever she suggested that, yes, well, perhaps they had better call there on the way home, because she believed she had ordered a packet of arrowroot, the motor would invariably climb the hill from the town groaning with innumerable parcels. + 

Halo paused in the glass door leading into the hall. “I want the car for myself, Lorry,” she said decisively, and turned to go in. Behind her, as she crossed the hall, she heard her brother’s precipitate steps. “See here, Halo⁠—stop! I’m going down to meet Lewis; I want to.” + 

She faced him with her faint smile. “Oh, certainly. Come with me, then.” + 

“What’s the use of your going?” His handsome irresolute mouth grew sulky and resentful. “Fact is I rather want to see Lewis alone. We’ve got a little matter⁠—” + 

His sister’s eyebrows rose ironically. “So I supposed. How much this time, Lorry?” + 

“How much⁠—?” + 

“Yes. Only don’t exaggerate. I’ve told you I want the car for myself. How much were you going to ask Lewis to lend you?” + 

Her brother, flushing up, began to protest and ejaculate. “Damned impertinence⁠—” But Halo lifted her arm to examine her wristwatch. “Don’t splutter like Father when he says he’s going to denounce an outrage in the papers. And don’t be exorbitant either.” She fumbled in the shabby antelope bag which hung from her other wrist. “Here⁠—will this do?” She took out two ten-dollar notes and held them toward her brother. + 

“Hell, child⁠—” he stammered, manifestly tempted and yet furious. + 

“You know you wouldn’t get as much out of Lewis. Better take it.” + 

He stood with his hands in his pockets, his chin down, staring at the notes without moving. + 

“Come, Lorry; I tell you I’m in a hurry.” She made a slight motion as though to reopen the bag and put back the money. + 

“I’ll go down myself to fetch Lewis,” he mumbled, all the fluid lines of his face hardening into an angry obstinacy. + 

“You won’t!” + 

“Won’t I? You’ll see, then⁠—” He caught her by the wrist, and they stood glaring at each other and breathing hard, like two angry young animals. Then Halo, with a laugh, wrenched her hand free, and reopening the bag drew out another ten dollars. She tossed the three notes on the table, and walked across the hall and out of the front door. No footsteps followed her, and she deemed it superfluous to glance back and see if the money had been removed from the table. + 

VIII + 

In the cobwebby coach-house of the old stable she found the man-of-all-work, Jacob, who was chauffeur when he was not gardener and dairyman, lying on the floor with his head under the car. He emerged at her call, and said he guessed there was something wrong again, because Mr. Lorry had had trouble getting her up the hill, and maybe he’d better take her to pieces while he was about it. + 

“Not on your life. I’m going down to Paul’s Landing in her this minute.” + 

Jacob stared, but without protesting. “You won’t get back, very likely,” he merely observed, and Halo scrambled into the motor with a laugh and a shrug. The motor, she said to herself, was like life in general at Eaglewood: it was always breaking down, but it always managed to keep on going. “Tied together with string and patched up with court plaster: that’s been the way with everything in the family ever since I can remember.” She gave a little sigh as she slipped down the overgrown drive, heading for the stone pillars of the gateway. The motor, she knew, would be all right going down the hill to Paul’s Landing⁠—and after that, at the moment, she didn’t particularly care. If she and Lewis Tarrant had to walk back to Eaglewood in the dark⁠—well, Lewis wouldn’t mind, she imagined. But meanwhile she had to catch up somehow with her forgotten engagement. + 

In a few minutes the winding road down the mountain brought her to the sad outskirts of Paul’s Landing, and thence to the Tracys’ house. She jumped out, ran up the steps and knocked, looking about her curiously as she did so. She seldom went to the Tracys’, and had forgotten how shabby and humble the place was. The discovery increased her sense of compunction and self-disapproval. How could she have forgotten that clever boy there for so long! If he had been one of her own group it would never have happened. “If there’s anything I hate,” she reflected, “it’s seeming casual to people who live like this.” And instantly she decided that one ought to devote one’s whole life to the Tracys and their kind, and that to enjoy the world’s goods, even in the limited and precarious way in which they were enjoyed at Eaglewood, while other lives like these were being lived at one’s door, denoted a vulgarity of soul which was the last fault she would have cared to confess to. What made it worse, too, in the particular case, was the Tracys’ far-off cousinship with the Lorburn family; the fact that two or three generations ago a foolish (and elderly) Lorburn virgin had run away with farmer Tracy’s son, who worked in the cement factory down on the river, and being cast off by her family had dropped to the level of her husband’s, with whom affairs had not gone well, and who had left his widow and children in poverty. Nowadays all this would have signified much less, as far as the family’s social situation went; but in the compact life of sixty years ago it was a hopeless fall to lapse from the height of Eaglewood to the depth in which the small shopkeepers and farmers of Paul’s Landing had their being. It was all wrong, Halo mused, wrinkling her young brows like her mother’s in the effort to think out, then and there, while she waited for her ring to be answered, the quickest way of putting an end to such injustice. + 

The development of her plan was interrupted by the appearance of young Upton, who looked at her with such surprise that she felt more acutely than ever her suddenly discovered obligation toward his family. + 

“Oh, Upton, how are you? I know I’ve interrupted you at supper! I hope your mother won’t be very angry with me.” + 

“Angry⁠—?” young Tracy echoed, bewildered. He passed the back of his hand over his mouth in the effort to conceal the fact that she had rightly suspected him of coming from supper. “I thought mebbe there was something wrong at the Willows,” he said. + 

“The Willows! No. Or rather, yes, it is about the Willows⁠—” She burst out laughing. “Don’t look so frightened, poor Upton! The wrongdoing’s mine, all mine. I believe I promised to meet your cousin there this afternoon, to let him take a look at the books.⁠ ⁠…” She looked interrogatively at Upton, and caught his motion of assent. “Didn’t I? Yes. Well⁠—and I didn’t go. It was all my fault. The fact is I was⁠ ⁠… prevented⁠ ⁠… at the last minute. I should so like to see him and explain.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Oh,” said Upton, with evident relief. He glanced about him timidly, away from her sweeping searching eyes: “If you’ll step into the parlour, Miss Halo⁠—” + 

She shook her head. “No, I won’t do that, or your mother’ll feel she ought to leave her supper to receive me. And I’ve only got a minute⁠—I’m meeting a friend at the station,” she reminded herself with a start, for that also she had been near forgetting. “So if you’ll just ask your cousin⁠—Vance, that’s his name, isn’t it?⁠—ask him to come out here and say two words to me⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Oh, certainly,” Upton agreed. He turned back into the house, but the visitor caught him by the sleeve. “Upton! Listen. Don’t mention my name; don’t tell Vance I’m here. Just say it’s somebody with a message⁠—somebody with a message,” she repeated, trying with her sharp italics to bore the fact into the youth’s brain. + 

“Oh, certainly,” Upton repeated. He walked away to the back of the house, and Héloïse, already partly rid of her burden of self-reproach, as she always tended to be the moment she had given it expression, stood looking absently over the garden, the broken-down fence, and the darkness already gathering in the folds of the hills. + 

She heard another step, and saw Vance Weston. He stood gazing at her with wide open eyes, his face small and drawn from his recent illness. In the twilight of the library at the Willows he had not looked so boyish; now she was struck by his frailness and immaturity, and felt sorrier than ever that she had failed to keep her promise. + 

“It’s me, Vance. I’ve come to apologize about this afternoon.” + 

“Oh⁠—” he began, as awkwardly as Upton. + 

“You went to the Willows after lunch, and waited for me?” He nodded without speaking. + 

“Waited hours?” + 

“I didn’t mind. I sat in the porch. I liked it.” + 

“Well, it was hideous of me⁠—hideous! I don’t know how⁠ ⁠…” + 

He looked at her in surprise. “How could you help it? Upton said something prevented you⁠—” + 

“Ah⁠—then he told you I was here?” She laughed with amusement, and relapsed into self-accusal. “It was worse, much worse! What I told Upton wasn’t true. Nothing prevented me⁠—and nobody. I simply forgot. The day was so heavenly⁠—wasn’t it? I went off alone, up the mountain, to bathe in a pool in the woods; and I took some books and the dogs; and I forgot everything.⁠ ⁠… Can you ever forgive me?” She stretched her hands out, but he stood and looked at them, bewildered, as if not believing such a gift could be meant for him, even for the space of a touch. + 

“A pool in the woods⁠ ⁠… is it anywhere near here? Could I get to it?” he questioned eagerly. + 

“Of course you could. I’ll take you. It’s the divinest place! In weather like this it’s better even than books.⁠ ⁠… But you shall see the books too,” she added, suffusing him in her sudden smile. + 

He reddened slightly, with the flush of convalescence, which leaves the face paler when it goes. “I⁠—that’s awfully kind⁠ ⁠…” + 

“No. I’m never kind. But I like to share my treasures⁠—sometimes.” She continued to look at him, noting with a sort of detached appreciation, as characteristic of her as the outward glow, the good shape of his head with its shock of rumpled brown hair, the breadth and modelling of his forehead, and the strong planting of the nose between his widely set eyes, the gray eyes which sometimes seemed to bring his whole self to their surface, and sometimes to draw it back into an inaccessible retreat, as when she had surprised him over “Kubla Khan” at the Willows. Decidedly, she thought, in saying that she had not gone too far. She was jealous of what she called her treasures; but here was someone with whom they might be shared. Yes, she would let him see the pool.⁠ ⁠… But when? Her life was always crowded with projects, engagements, fragments of unfinished work; there were always people arriving at Eaglewood, or opportunities to dash off from it (with visitors who had motors), or passionately absorbing things to be dealt with on the spot⁠—as she was dealing with the Weston boy now. Yes, better do it at once, before other things crowded in. It would be the friendliest way of wiping out her forgetfulness.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Do you get up early?” she asked. “Do you care about sunrises?” + 

He coloured again, with pleasure, as it seemed. Her elliptic interrogatory seemed to have no fears for him. “Yes. I guess the pool would be great then,” he said. + 

“Oh, well, we’ll see the Hudson first. You can’t see it from here, can you?” She felt a sudden contempt for the unimaginativeness of living like the Tracys. “You’ve no idea what it is from Eaglewood⁠—and better still from up above⁠—from the ridge of Thundertop. The river’s like a sea at that hour. You don’t speak German?” He made a negative gesture, and she added: “I was only going to quote something from Faust⁠—you’ll read it some day⁠—but now just listen to the sound: + 

“ ‘Die Sonne tönt nach alter Weise + 

In Brudersphären Wettgesang. + 

Und ihre vorgeschriebene Reise + 

Vollendet sie mit Donnergang. + 

Ihr Anblick giebt den Engeln Stärke + 

Wenn keiner sie ergründen mag, + 

Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke + 

Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.’ + 

“Isn’t that beautiful to you, just as mere music, without any meaning? Besides, that whole question of meaning in poetry⁠ ⁠… I have an old friend I wrangle with about it by the hour⁠ ⁠…” She broke off, and gathering up her whole attention, poured it for a moment into the gaze she shed on him. “I have an idea! If you’re not afraid of getting too tired (you’ve been ill, I know), what do you say to my bringing the car down to the corner of the lane tomorrow, about half an hour before sunrise? I’ll run you up to Thundertop first, and we’ll have a picnic breakfast by the pool. Does that tempt you? Only you’ll have to get up⁠—when? Half-past two, I suppose! And we’ll see the stars fade like flowers, and a new world born⁠—don’t you feel it’s a new world every morning? And it will be all ours, with no one to interfere, or spoil it⁠—Oh, Vance,” she broke off, lifting her wrist to her shortsighted eyes. “I do believe my watch has stopped! The brute! Can you tell me the time? I’ve got to meet a friend at the station, and it’s nearly dark, and the car’s only going on one leg.⁠ ⁠…” He pulled out a new-looking watch, and gave her the hour. “Oh, misery! can I make it? Well, I’ll have to try, or Lewis won’t have his suitcase till tomorrow; and he loathes borrowing pyjamas.” She stood poised in the dusk of the porch as if her outcry had given her wings; then she turned and held out her hand. This time Vance took it in his. “Well⁠—so long. Don’t oversleep yourself! I’ll be on the stroke tomorrow,” she laughed. + 

She ran down the steps and scrambled into the car, and the Providence which cares for the improvident carried her to the station just in time for the arrival of the train from New York. + 

A perspiring throng was pouring out of the station, but she had to wait for some time before she was joined by a fair-haired young man in a light gray suit, whose movements had the deliberation of a nervous traveller determined to keep cool. + 

The two greeted each other with friendly familiarity. “I was afraid you’d get tired of waiting, and run away before I turned up,” the young man said, as he put himself and his suitcase into the motor, “but I didn’t want to get mixed up with that dripping crowd.” + 

She replied with a laugh that running away was the last thing the motor was thinking of, and that it was doubtful if they wouldn’t have to push her up the hill or drop her at a garage for repairs. But this did not seem to dismay him. + 

“I suppose Lorry’s been out in her again,” he merely remarked; and Miss Spear rejoined that it was no use trying to hide the family secrets from him. He settled himself comfortably at her side, and she put her hand on the wheel. The car, after making a spasmodic dash, hovered a moment between arrest and movement, and then spurted up the mountain as if nothing in the world had been the matter with it. As they bumped up the road under the dark arch of overhanging trees Halo lapsed into silence, her attention seemingly absorbed in the delicate task of persuading the motor to forget its grievances till they were safely landed at Eaglewood. In reality her mind was still lingering over her talk with young Weston, and his curious way of leaping straight at the gist of things, as when, at the Willows, he had asked her as soon as she appeared in the doorway who had written “Kubla Khan,” and just now had seized upon her mention of a mountain pool, instantly crying: “Could I get to it?” That way of disposing of preliminaries, brushing them aside with an impatient shake, as he tossed the tumbled hair from his forehead⁠—what a sense it gave of a latent power under his unformed boyish manner. And what a wonderful thing life would be without idle preliminaries⁠—as clear of smoke and rubbish as the crystal world of sunrise she was going to show him from the mountain! Getting at once to the heart of things: that was the secret. But how many people know it, or had any idea where the heart of things really was?⁠ ⁠… + 

She felt a touch on her arm. “Penny, Halo.” + 

“My thoughts? I don’t know.⁠ ⁠… Well, yes.” She gave a little laugh. “I was thinking I’d spent thirty dollars this afternoon, and what I’d bought with it.” + 

“New hat?” + 

She laughed. “Exactly. A new hat⁠—a wishing-cap!” + 

He laughed too, with an easy vague air of assent and approval. “Though why you women keep on buying new hats as you do, when you all of you go bareheaded⁠—” + 

“Ah,” she murmured, “that’s what makes it such fun. Art for art’s sake. Besides, as it happens, my new hat’s invisible, and I’ve got it on at this very minute.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Well, if you have it’s awfully becoming,” he rejoined. + 

“How silly! When you know you can’t see it⁠—” + 

“I don’t so much care about that, if I can see what’s going on underneath it.” She fell suddenly silent, and he added in the same quiet voice: “Halo, can I?” + 

“Just what is it you want to see?” + 

“Well⁠—just if you think we’re engaged.” + 

She drew away slightly from his gesture. “When you think we are it always makes me think we’re not.” + 

“Oh well⁠—I’ll try not to think about it at all then,” he rejoined good-humouredly. + 

To this at the moment she made no answer, and they drove on again in silence under the overhanging boughs; but as she turned the motor in at the gate she said, with another of her fugitive laughs and eyes bent on his: “You see, Lewis, I’m as like this old car as her twin sister. When she says she won’t she almost always does.” + 

IX + 

The summer darkness rustled with the approach of dawn. At the foot of the lane below the Tracys’ Vance Weston felt the stir as if it were one with the noise in his own temples: a web of sounds too tenuous to be defined or isolated, but something so different from the uniform silence which had enveloped the world an hour earlier that every blade of grass and feather of bird now seemed sighing and ruffling in the darkness. + 

Vance had crept unheard out of the sleeping house, and now, in the obscurity of the lane, sat on a stone under a twisted thorn tree and listened for the splutter of the Eaglewood motor. Miss Spear might forget him again, as she had forgotten him (how he liked her for owning it!) the day before; or the car, which she had said was going on one leg, might fall dead lame, and leave her stranded before she could get down the mountain. But he did not really believe that either of these things would happen. There are days which give you, in the very moment of waking, the assurance that they were born for you, are yours to do as you please with; this was one of them for Vance. + 

He had been, not offended, but hurt and a little bewildered, at Miss Spear’s failure to come to the Willows the previous afternoon, after sending him word that if he met her there she would let him spend a long afternoon with the books. She had taken the trouble to ask for Upton at the nursery, where she had called to pick up a basket of plants for her mother, and had instructed him to tell his cousin Vance to be at the Willows punctually at three, and to let her know in case he could not come. It was the tenth day after Vance’s arrival, and that very morning he had made up his mind to go to New York. He was going alone, for Upton could only get away on Sundays; moreover, Vance knew by this time that as a guide his cousin would be of little use. All that Upton seemed to know of the metropolis was where the wholesale seedmen and nurserymen had their offices; as a means of introducing Vance to the world of journalism Laura Lou would have been about as helpful. Vance therefore meant to go alone, not with any hope of arriving within speaking distance of an editor, but to slake his curiosity with a sight of the outside of some of the big newspaper offices, and get an impression of the general aspect of the city. He had waited for over a week, partly because of the oppressive heat (his mother was right, it was worse than Chicago) and his own lingering physical weakness, but chiefly because his afternoon in the library at the Willows, and the brief apparition there of the girl who might have been old Miss Lorburn’s reincarnation, had thrown him into a sort of prolonged daydream, which was broken only by intervals of frenzied composition. + 

When the summons came from Miss Spear to meet Miss Spear again at the Willows he threw New York to the winds, and lived through the next twenty-four hours in a tremor of expectation. Long before three he was unlocking the gate of the deserted place and pushing his bicycle through the grass and clover of the drive. The day was cooler⁠—it would have been a good day for New York⁠—and the green air under the willows trembled with a delicious freshness. Vance sat down on the doorstep. From where he sat he could get a glimpse of the gate through the shimmering branches, and watch the shadows of the trees wheel slowly across the lawn. The air was rich with the smell of syringas, that smell which is so like the sound of bees on a thundery day. Vance leaned his head back against a pillar of the porch and waited.⁠ ⁠… + 

He had been sincere in saying to Miss Spear that while he waited he had not been impatient or angry. He had always had a habit of rumination unusual at his age, and everything in this new life was so strange, so unreal, that even in its disappointments and denials he found food for his imagination. The spell of Miss Lorburn’s house was stronger now than on his first visit, because in the interval he had lived among people, plain unimaginative people, who nevertheless took old houses for granted, took age and permanence for granted, seemed in fact to live with one foot in the grave of the past, like the people pushing back their tombstones in a queer stiff sculpture of the Last Judgment that he had seen reproduced in some illustrated travel paper. The fact that the Tracys, who never thought of anything but the present, were yet so tacitly imbued with the past, so acquiescent in its power and its fatality, that they attached such a ritual significance to phrases like “a very long time ago,” and “it’s always been so,” and “nothing will be changed as long as any of the family are alive,” had completely altered Vance’s perspective, transforming his world from the staring flatness of a movie closeup to a many-vistaed universe reaching away on all sides from this empty and silent house. Even the thought of the books inside the house, so close yet inaccessible, did not long tantalize him. It was enough to sit there waiting, listening for the noise of the motor, and in the intervals straining his ear to catch the secret coming and going of the Past behind the barred threshold. + 

It was only when dusk fell that he roused himself to the fact that Miss Spear had failed him. Then his boyish pride reasserted itself, and for a moment he felt sore and humiliated. He remembered things Upton had said: “She never stays anywhere more than five minutes.⁠ ⁠… A gentleman friend called for her in his car.⁠ ⁠…” and subsequent allusions picked up from Mrs. Tracy, who had been speechless with surprise when she learned that Miss Spear intended to devote an afternoon to showing Vance the books at the Willows. “Well, I never! Anyhow, she’s got the right to⁠—I guess some day the place will be hers,” was one of the things Mrs. Tracy had said; and Laura Lou, breaking her habitual silence, had added in her quick fluttering way: “I don’t believe she’ll ever live at Paul’s Landing. She says she means to travel all the time when she’s married.⁠ ⁠…” + 

All this wove itself into Vance’s own picture of the pale dark-haired young woman who had appeared to him so suddenly, and taken up the verse of “Kubla Khan” in her rich chanting voice. He had assumed her to be some years older than himself, and at nineteen, and to a mind as ignorant of class distinctions as his, such a difference of age put a much greater distance between them than the fact that Miss Spear lived at “the big house” (as the Tracys called Eaglewood), or even that she was to inherit the Willows, or meant to travel all the time when she was married.⁠ ⁠… Vance thought of her as goddesslike and remote, mistress of the keys of knowledge and experience; her notice had flushed him with pride, but it seemed a part of the mysterious unreality of everything in this new world. As he got to his feet and walked back to the gate of the Willows he felt his first pang of wounded pride. She had forgotten him; forgotten him because he was too young and insignificant to be remembered; because fellows called for her and carried her off in their cars; because she never stayed anywhere more than five minutes.⁠ ⁠… + 

Ah, how differently he thought of her now! Since her breathless arrival at the Tracy house on the previous evening, her summoning him out to the porch to accuse and excuse herself, the goddess had become woman again, and he was sure that the woman was to be trusted. She still seemed to him a good deal older than himself, but that now gave him a happy sense of ease and freedom, instead of the feverish excitement which the advances of a girl of his own age would have occasioned.⁠ ⁠… + 

As he waited in the darkness the early noises of awakening life began to stir. He heard the long eerie scream of a train far away; then the rumble of a motor truck down the turnpike at the foot of the hill, followed by the jolt of a lame farm horse coming in with garden produce; and lastly, close by, the cluck-cluck of the Eaglewood motor⁠—and she was there. + 

“Vance!” she called gaily, half under her breath, as though instinctively adapting her voice to the whispered sounds of the hour. He had his hand on the door of the car, and in a moment was sitting at her side. “Now if she’ll only start!” the girl sighed. The car kicked and jibbed and stood stock still, as it had the evening before; then it was off with a rush, as if aware of the challenge to its powers, and amused at so unusual an adventure. + 

Vance was too full of happy emotion to speak. When Miss Spear said: “Did you think I was going to forget you again?” he merely answered: “No,” and she laughed, as if the simplicity of the answer pleased her, and then fell silent too. + 

When they started up the wooded road to the mountain there still lingered so much of night under the branches that she had to turn on the headlights, and the white stretch of illumination on each side of the motor was filled with layer upon layer of delicately drawn motionless leaves, between which the ruts of the road seemed to Vance to rise up and meet them as they climbed. All these details burnt themselves into his brain with a curious precision, as if he had been crawling at a snail’s pace through an eternity of overarching foliage, while at the same time the wheezy car seemed to be whirling him breathlessly to unknown distances; so that when the headlights painted the sudden picture of two gateposts of gray stone flanking a drive he was startled to hear Miss Spear say: “There’s Eaglewood,” for he thought they must long since have reached the ridge of the mountain above it. + 

They still mounted; the air was growing cooler; at last it was almost cold. The headlights paled gradually in the imperceptible growth of dawn, and when Miss Spear remembered to turn them out the road was scarcely less distinct, though everything appeared farther away and softer to the eye. At last the motor came out of the woodland, high up on a stretch of rough country road between fields. The sky arched overhead dim and pallid, with here and there a half-drowned star like a petal in gray water. They passed once more under trees, the world grew all dark again, and Miss Spear, stopping the motor, said: “Here.” + 

They were in a tree-shadowed trail leading from the road to the foot of a steep overhanging rock. “There’s Thundertop,” Miss Spear said. She jumped out, and Vance after her. They scrambled up from ledge to ledge and finally reached a projecting rocky spur from which they saw, far below and around, the outspread earth, its lonely mountain masses and habitable slopes, and hollows still indistinct, all waiting inanimate for the light. + 

“If it shouldn’t happen!” Miss Spear exclaimed. Vance turned to her in wonder. She had spoken his very thought; and to youth such coincidences are divine. + 

“Or if it had never happened before⁠—if we were actually looking at the very first.⁠ ⁠… Ah!” she broke off on a deep breath; for a faint vibration, less of light than of air, a ripple of coming life, had begun to flow over the sky and the opposite mountains, hushing every incipient sound. There was a lull after that first tremor; a lull lasting so long that it seemed as if, after all, nothing in the landscape had moved or altered. Then Miss Spear, laying her hand on Vance’s shoulder, turned him about toward a break in the swarthy fell of the eastern mountains; and through it came the red edge of the sun. They watched in silence as it hung there apparently unmoving; then they glanced away for a moment, and when they looked back they saw that it had moved; saw the forerunning glow burn away the ashen blur in the forest hollows, the upper sky whiten, and daylight take possession of the air. Again they turned westward, looking toward the Hudson, and now the tawny suffusion was drawing down the slopes of the farther shore, till gradually, very gradually, the river hollows also were washed of their mists, and the great expanse of the river shone bright as steel in the clear shadow. + 

Vance drew a deep breath. His lips were parted, but no word came. He met Miss Spear’s smiling eyes with a vague stare. “Kubla Khan?” she said. He nodded. + 

“You’d never seen one of our sunrises?” + 

“No, only over the prairies.” + 

“Well, that must be rather splendid too. But very different⁠—like seeing it over the sea.” + 

He made no response, for he had never seen the sea, and there was no room in his soul for more new visions. + 

“It’s less of an effort to see the sun rise in Illinois, I suppose?” Miss Spear continued. “You only have to look out of your window. Here it involves mountaineering, and it’s given me a mountaineer’s appetite; hasn’t it you?” + 

He didn’t know; he supposed so; but he hardly heard what she said. His whole sentient self was still away from him, in the blue and gold of the uprolling. He would have liked to lie down there on the edge of Thundertop between the misty splendours below and the pure light above, and let the hours drift by while the chariot of the day described its great circuit before him. At such moments he was almost disembodied. + 

“Come along, Vance! I’m ravening. Ham and eggs over a gipsy fire!” She slipped a comrade-arm through his, and they started to scramble down from their eminence, leaving at each step a fragment of the mighty spectacle behind them. Vance, reluctantly following, thought to himself: “She never stays anywhere more than five minutes⁠—” + 

But by the time they had reached the motor hunger had seized him too, and he was laughing with her while she made sure that the lunch basket and thermos were somewhere among the odds and ends under the seat, and thinking he had never met anybody who made things so easy, yet was somehow so gaily aloof. With a fresh expenditure of persuasion and violence she got the motor going, and they backed out of the trail, and started down the mountain. About halfway of the descent Miss Spear turned into another trail, deeply shadowed, and they took out their provisions, and began to climb through the forest. Presently the little woodland noises, twitter of birds and stir of leaf, were all merged in the tinkle of an unseen brook, and a little farther on they met the brook itself, leaping down wet ledges in a drip of ferns and grasses, till it led them to the rocky pool encircled with turf of which Miss Spear had told him. There she unpacked the basket, and Vance brought two stones, and some twigs to lay across them; but they could find no dry fuel in that mossy dripping place, and had to eat their eggs raw, and munch the ham between slices of stale bread. Luckily the coffee was piping hot, and when Vance had drained his cup his tongue was loosened, and there poured from him all that he had been revolving in his mind, and thirsting to utter, since his first encounter with Miss Spear at the Willows. He could hardly keep the thread of the talk in his hands, so quickly did one idea tumble out after another, and so many new trains of thought did Miss Spear’s answers start in the coverts of his mind. + 

Afterward, in looking back at the adventure, he wondered at the fact that he had hardly been conscious of his companion’s age or sex, hardly aware of the grave beauty of her face, had felt her only as the mysterious vehicle of all the new sensations pouring into his soul⁠—as if she had been the element harmonizing the scene, or a being born of the sunrise and the forest. + 

Yet afterward he saw nothing ethereal or remote about her; to his memory she became again a dark-haired girl with thoughtful eyes and animated lips, who leaned back, her hat tossed off, her bare arms folded behind her head, and plied him with friendly questions. The trouble was that every one of the questions, though to her so evidently simple and matter-of-course for him, called a new vision out of the unknown, as the car’s headlights, while they climbed the mountain, had kept on painting pictures on the darkness. The simplest things she said presupposed a familiarity with something or other that he was ignorant of: allusions to people and books, associations of ideas, images and metaphors, each giving an electric shock to his imagination, and making him want to linger and question before she hurried him on to the next point. + 

What she wanted, for her part, was evidently just to be helpful and friendly. She had guessed, perhaps, that there was not much nourishment for him in life at the Tracys’, and wondered what direction he would take when that interval was over, as she assumed it would be soon. He acknowledged that he had accepted his parents’ proposal to send him to his cousins for his convalescence because it was a way of being brought nearer New York, which at the moment was the place he most wanted to get to; and when she asked why⁠—whether just as a big sight, or with some special object? he answered, feeling himself hot from feet to forehead at the confession, yet unable to hold it back, that, yes, what he wanted was to live in New York and be a writer. + 

“A writer? I see. But that’s interesting.” Miss Spear raised herself on her elbow and reached for a cigarette, while her eyes continued to rest on his crimson countenance. “Tell me more about it. What do you want to write?” + 

He threw back his head and gave back her look with a thumping heart. “Poetry.” + 

Her face lit up. “Oh, but that’s splendid! You’ve written a lot already, I suppose?” + 

“Not a lot. Some.” How flat the monosyllables sounded! And all the while his brain rustled with rich many-branching words that were too tangled up with each other to be extricated. Miss Spear smiled, and said: “This is just the place for poetry, isn’t it? Do repeat something of yours.” + 

Vance’s heart dropped back to silence. No one had ever before asked him to recite his verses. The inside of his mouth grew parched and there was a buzzing in his head. This girl had commanded him, here in this magical place, to recite to her something he had written! His courage began to ebb away now that he was confronted with this formidable opportunity. + 

He moistened his dry lips, closed his mind’s eyes as if preparing to leap into space, and said: “ ‘Trees.’ ” + 

“Is that the title?” + 

“Yes. They were the first things that struck me when I got here⁠—the trees. They’re different from ours, thicker, there are more of them⁠ ⁠… I don’t know⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Yes, and so⁠—” + 

He began: “Arcane, aloof, and secret as the soul⁠ ⁠…” + 

She sat motionless, resting her chin on her lifted hand. Her cigarette went out, and dropped to the damp mosses of the poolside. “Secret as the soul,” she murmured. “Yes.” She nodded softly, but did not speak again, and at times, as he went on, he forgot her presence and seemed alone with his own imagination; then again he felt her so close that her long meditative face, drooping slightly, seemed to interpose itself between his eyes and what he was saying, and he was chilled by the thought that when, in a moment, he ceased reciting, the face would be there, unescapable, rhadamanthine, like death at the end of life. He poured out the last words of the poem in a rush, and there was a long silence, an endless silence, it seemed to the poet, before his hearer spoke. + 

“You recite too fast; you swallow half the words. Oh, why aren’t people in our country taught⁠—? But there are beautiful things⁠ ⁠…” She paused, and seemed to muse discriminatingly upon them. “That about the city of leaves⁠ ⁠… I wish you’d write it out for me, will you? Then I can read it over to myself. If you have a bit of paper, do write it now.” + 

Vance had the inevitable bit of paper, and the fountain pen from which he was never parted. He pulled out the paper, spread it on a stone, and began to write. He was mortified that she thought his reading so bad, and his hand shook so that he feared she would hardly find the poem more intelligible than when he had recited it. At last he handed her the paper, and she held it to her shortsighted eyes during another awful interval of silence. + 

“Yes⁠—there are beautiful things in it. That image of the city of leaves⁠ ⁠… and the soul’s city being built of all the murmurs and rustlings of our impressions, emotions, instincts⁠ ⁠…” She laid the page down, and lifted her head, drawing her eyelids together meditatively. “By the way, do you know what the first temple at Delphi was built of?” She paused, smiling in expectation of his enjoyment. “Of birds’ feathers and honey. Singing and humming! Sweetness and lightness! Isn’t that magical?” + 

Vance gazed at her, captivated but bewildered. Did he understand⁠—or did he not? Birds’ feathers and honey? His heart beat with the strange disturbing beauty of the metaphor⁠—for metaphor it must be, of course. Yet bodying forth what? In his excitement over the phrase, his perplexity at the question, he felt himself loutish and unresponsive for not answering. But he could not think of anything to say. + 

“The First Church of Christ at Delphi? Christian Science, you mean? I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he stammered at length. + 

She stared as if she didn’t either; then she gave a little laugh. “Well, no, nothing quite so recent. The legend is about the first temple of Delphi⁠—(I mean the Greek Delphi, the famous shrine, where Apollo’s oracle was)⁠—well, the legend is that the first temple was only a hut of feathers and honey, built in that uninhabited place by the bees and birds, who knew there was a god there long before man came and discovered him.⁠ ⁠…” She broke off, and folded up the paper. “That’s a subject for another poem, isn’t it?⁠ ⁠… But this one,” she added, rousing herself, and turning again to Vance with her look of eager encouragement, “this I do like immensely. You’ll let me keep it? I have a great friend who really cares for poetry, and I want to show it to him. And won’t you repeat another? Please do. I love lying here and listening to beautiful words all mixed up with the sound of water and leaves⁠ ⁠… Only you know, Vance,” she added, fixing him suddenly with a piercing humorous glance, “I should leave ‘urge’ as a noun to the people who write blurbs for book jackets; and ‘dawn’ and lorn’ do not rhyme in English poetry, not yet.⁠ ⁠…” + 

A silence followed. The girl’s praise and understanding⁠—above all, her understanding⁠—had swung Vance so high above his everyday self that it was as if, at her touch, wings had grown from him. And now, abruptly, her verbal criticism, suggesting other possibilities of the same kind, hinting at abysses of error into which he might drop unawares at any moment, brought him down like a shot bird. He hardly understood what she meant, did not know what there was to find fault with in the English of the people who wrote for book jackets⁠—it was indeed the sort of thing he aspired to excel in some day himself⁠—and still less understood what she meant when she attacked the validity of rhymes as self-evident to the ear as “lorn” and “dawn.” Perverse and arbitrary as she evidently was⁠—and sound-deaf, probably⁠—she might as well have said (very likely would, if challenged) that “morn” and “gone” did not rhyme in English poetry! He was so passionately interested in everything concerning the material and the implements of his art that at another time he would have welcomed a discussion of the sort; but in this hour of creative exaltation, when his imagination was still drenched with the wonder of the adventure, and the girl’s praise, as she listened, had already started a twitter of new rhythms and images in his brain, it was like falling from a mortal height to have such praise qualified by petty patronizing comments, which were all the more disturbing because he found no answer to them. + 

“Don’t rhyme⁠—in English poetry?” he stammered, paling under the blow. But Miss Spear had sprung to her feet and stood looking down on him with the sportive but remote radiance of some woodland spirit. + 

“Oh, but what does all that matter? I don’t know what made me even speak of it.” She continued to look at him, and as she did so, the anxious groping expression of her shortsighted eyes, as she tried to read his, suddenly humanized her face and brought her close again. “It was just my incurable mania for taking everything to pieces. Gilding the lily⁠—who was the fool who said that wasn’t worth doing?⁠ ⁠… But I shouldn’t have spoken, you know, Vance, if I didn’t believe you have the gift⁠ ⁠… the real gift⁠ ⁠… ‘the sublime awkwardness that belittles talent,’ as George Frenside calls it⁠ ⁠…” + 

His heart swelled as he listened. How she knew how to bind up the hurts she made! “The sublime awkwardness⁠ ⁠…” He trembled with the shock of the phrase. Who talked or wrote like that, he wondered? Was it anyone he could see, or whose books he could get hold of⁠—in the Willows library, perhaps? “Who’s that you spoke of?” he asked breathlessly. + 

“The man who can talk to you better than anybody else about English poetry.” + 

“Oh, do you know him? Can I see him? Is he alive?” + 

To each question Miss Spear, still looking down on him, nodded her assent. “He’s the friend I spoke of just now. He’s staying at Eaglewood. He’s the literary critic of The Hour.” She watched the effect of this announcement with her sleepy narrowed glance. “I’ll bring him down to see you some day⁠—the day I show you the Willows library,” she said. + 

Vance had never heard of Frenside, or the paper called The Hour; but the assurance with which she pronounced the names stamped them with immediate importance. His heart was beating furiously; but such shining promises were no longer enough for him. Upton’s allusions to Miss Spear’s unreliability and elusiveness came back to him; and he remembered with a new resentfulness his hours of waiting at Miss Lorburn’s door. Perhaps something of this incredulity showed in his eyes, for Miss Spear added, with one of her sudden touches of gentleness: “I can’t tell you now just what day; but I’ll leave word with Upton at the nursery, I promise I will. And now come, Vance, we must pack up and start. Our sunrise isn’t ours any longer. It belongs to the whole stupid world.⁠ ⁠…” + 

X + 

Waking near noon that day from the sleep into which she had fallen after the vigil on Thundertop, Héloïse Spear sat up in bed and thought: “What’s wrong?” + 

She stretched her arms above her head, pushed back her hair from her sleepy eyes, and looked about her room, which was cooled by the soft green light filtered through the leaves of the ancient trumpet creeper above her window. For a moment or two the present was drowned in the remembered blaze of the sunrise, and the enjoyment of the hunger satisfied beside the pool; but already she knew that⁠—as was almost invariable in her experience⁠—something disagreeable lurked in the heart of her memories: as if every enjoyment in life had to be bought by a bother. + 

“That boy has eyes⁠—I was right,” she thought; and then, immediately: “Oh, I know, the motor!” For she had remembered, in the act of re-evoking young Weston, that on the way home the car had stopped suddenly, a mile or more above Eaglewood, and that, after a long struggle (during which he had stood helplessly watching her, seemingly without an idea as to how he might come to her aid) they had had to abandon it by the roadside, and she had parted with her companion at the Eaglewood gates after telling him how to find his way home on foot. She herself had meant to take a couple of hours of sleep, and then slip out early to catch the man-of-all-work before the household was up, and persuade him to get the delinquent motor home somehow. But as soon as she had undressed, and thrown herself on her bed, she sank into the bottomless sleep of youth; and here it was nearly lunchtime, and everybody downstairs, and the absence of the motor doubtless already discovered! And, with matters still undecided between herself and Lewis Tarrant, she had not especially wanted him to know that she had been out without him to see the sunrise⁠—the more so as he would never believe she had gone up to Thundertop unaccompanied. + 

Ah, how she envied the girls of her age who had their own cars, who led their own lives, sometimes even had their own bachelor flats in New York! Except as a means to independence riches were nothing to her; and to acquire them by marriage, and then coldly make use of them for her own purposes, was as distasteful to her as anything in her present life. And yet she longed for freedom, and saw no other way to it. If only her eager interest in life had been matched by some creative talent! She could half paint, she could half write⁠—but her real gift (and she knew it) was for appreciating the gifts of others. Even had discipline and industry fostered her slender talents they would hardly have brought her a living. She had measured herself and knew it⁠—and what else was there for her but marriage? “Oh, well,” she thought, for the thousandth time, “something may turn up⁠ ⁠…” which meant, as she knew, that her mother’s cousin, old Tom Lorburn, might drop off at any moment and leave her the Willows, with enough money to get away from it, and from Paul’s Landing, forever. + 

She heard her mother’s fluttering knock, and Mrs. Spear came in, drooping, distressed, and dimly beautiful. + 

“Oh, Halo⁠—asleep still? I’m sorry to disturb you, darling, but it’s after eleven” (“I know, I know,” grumbled Héloïse, always impatient of the obvious), “and something so tiresome has happened. The motor has disappeared. Jacob says somebody must have got into the garage in the night. The cook says she saw a dreadful-looking man hanging about yesterday evening; but the trouble is that the garage lock wasn’t broken open⁠—only it so seldom is locked, as I told your father. Your father says it’s Lorry again; he’s made such a dreadful scene before Lewis.⁠ ⁠… It’s not so much the fact of Lorry’s being out all night; but your father thinks he’s sold the car. And if he has we shall never see a penny of the money,” Mrs. Spear added, confusedly struggling to differentiate the causes of her distress, of which fear about the money was clearly by far the most potent. + 

Héloïse sat up in bed and gazed at her mother’s troubled countenance. “Even now,” she thought, “her eyes are beautiful; and she doesn’t screw them up in the ugly way that I do.” Then she roused herself to reality. “What nonsense⁠—nobody stole the motor,” she said. + 

“It was Lorry, then? He’s told you⁠—?” + 

“He’s told me nothing.” She paused, letting her imagination toy for a moment with the temptation to be silent; then she said: “The motor’s a mile up the road, toward Thundertop. It broke down, and I left it there myself early this morning.” The idea of allowing Lorry to bear the brunt of the storm had lasted no more than the taking of breath between two words; but it had stirred in her an old residuum of self-disgust. Yet she did wish she had got the car safely under cover before all this fuss! + 

Her mother stood staring at her with astonished eyes. “You, Halo? You had the car out in the middle of the night?” + 

“Yes. I had the car out. I went up to Thundertop to see the sunrise.” + 

“With Lewis, darling?” Mrs. Spear’s face brightened perceptibly; then it fell again. “But no, he was there just now when your father scolded poor Lorry, and of course if he’d been with you⁠—” + 

“He wasn’t with me. He doesn’t know anything about it.” + 

“Halo!” her mother moaned, “And you chose this time⁠—when he’d just arrived!” She paused with a gesture of despair. “Who was with you?” + 

Halo, sliding out of bed, got her feet into her flopping Moroccan slippers, and began to gather up her sponge and towels preparatory to an advance to the bathroom. “Oh, nobody in particular. Just that young boy from the Tracys’⁠—” + 

Mrs. Spear gasped out her perplexity. “Boy from Tracys’? You don’t mean Upton?” + 

“Of course not. How ridiculous! I mean the cousin from the West that they’ve got staying there⁠—the boy who’s had typhoid fever. Didn’t I tell you about him? He’s rather extraordinary; full of talent, I believe; and starving to death for want of books, and of people he can talk to. I promised to spend an afternoon with him at the Willows, and let him browse in the library, and then I forgot all about it, and to make up for having chucked him I slipped out early this morning and ran him up to Thundertop to see the sunrise. It was glorious. And he read me some of his poems⁠—he means to be a poet. I do believe there’s something in him, Mother.” + 

While Mrs. Spear listened the expression of her beautiful eyes passed from anxiety to a sympathetic exaltation. As her daughter was aware, one could never speak to Mrs. Spear of genius without kindling in her an irrepressible ardour to encourage and direct it. + 

“But, my dear, how interesting! Why didn’t you tell me about him before? Couldn’t George Frenside do something to help him? Couldn’t he publish his things in The Hour? I do hope you asked him to come back to lunch?” + 

Héloïse laughed. Her mother’s enthusiasms always amused her. To hear of the presence, within inviting distance, of a young man of talent (talent was always genius to Mrs. Spear) was instantly to make her forget her family and financial cares, however pressing, and begin to wonder anxiously what the cook could scrape together for lunch⁠—a sincere respect for good food being one of the anomalies of her oddly assorted character, and a succulent meal her instinctive homage to celebrity. “What time did you tell him to come⁠—one or half-past? I believe Susan could still manage a cheese soufflé⁠—but it’s nearly twelve now.” + 

“Yes; I know it is⁠—and you must give me a chance to take my bath. And how could I ask him to lunch? It wouldn’t be decent, when he’s staying with the Tracys, who, after all, are distant connections of ours, and whom we certainly don’t want to invite⁠—do we?” + 

Mrs. Spear, at this reminder, clasped her long expressive hands self-reproachfully. “Oh, those poor Tracys! Yes, they are distant relations. But if Lorburn Tracy, who was a poor sort of man anyhow, and less than nobody on his father’s side, chose to marry the gardener’s daughter at the Willows, we could hardly be expected, could we⁠ ⁠… ? Not that that sort of thing really matters in the least. Why should it? Only⁠—well, perhaps we’ve been snobbish about the Tracys, darling. Do you think we have? There’s nothing I hate so much as being snobbish. Do you think we ought to send Jacob down now with a note, and ask them all up to lunch with this young novelist you speak of? Not a novelist⁠—a poet? What a head I’ve got! My dear, I really believe we ought to. Is there any notepaper here? There so seldom is, in your room⁠ ⁠… but if you can find a scrap, do write a line to Mrs. Tracy, and say⁠ ⁠… say⁠ ⁠… well, put it as nicely as you can⁠ ⁠… and say that Jacob is at their door, with the car, waiting to bring them up; oh, with the young man, of course! Remind me again of the young man’s name, my dear.” + 

“Well, if I said all that, Mother, part of it would hardly be true, as the car’s a mile or more up the Thundertop road at this minute, and refuses to budge.” Héloïse let her mother’s outcries evaporate, and continued quietly: “Besides, you know perfectly well that we can’t ask the Tracys to lunch. We never have, and why should we now? They’d hate it as much as we should. They’re plain working people, and they have nothing on earth to say to us, or we to them. Why should we suddenly pretend the contrary?” + 

“Oh, Halo, how vulgar of you! I wonder how you can even think such things. All human beings ought to have things to say to each other, if only they meet on the broad basis of humanity and⁠ ⁠… and⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Well, the Tracys wouldn’t; how could they? They’ve never heard of the broad basis of humanity. If we had them here with Lewis and George Frenside, or any of our other friends, what on earth should we find to say to each other? They talk another language, and it can’t be helped. But this boy is different, and I’ve promised to take him to the Willows to go through the books, and to bring George down to see him there some day. So let’s let it go at that.⁠ ⁠…” And Héloïse, followed by her mother’s reproaches and ejaculations, made a dive for the door and dashed down the passage to the bathroom. + 

When she descended the worn shallow steps of the old staircase the lunch gong was sounding, and Mr. Spear was pacing the hall in a state of repressed excitement. Halo and Lorry, as children, had found in a popular natural history book a striking picture of a bristling caterpillar sitting upright on its tail, with the caption: “The male Puss-Moth when irritated after a full meal.” They instantly christened their progenitor the Puss-Moth, but modified the legend by explaining to strangers that he was more often irritated before a full meal than after⁠—especially when kept waiting for it. Today Mr. Spear was unusually perpendicular and bristling, and his small, rather too carefully modeled features were positively grimacing with anger. To his daughter long habit made the sight more comic than impressive; but she was vexed that the question of the motor had to be dealt with. + 

“Halo, I suppose you know the car was taken out of the garage last night, without the door lock’s being broken, and that it has not since been seen? Your mother tells me⁠—” + 

Halo nodded. “Mother knows. I’ve explained.” + 

“Explained! I don’t know what you call⁠—” + 

“Hullo, Lewis⁠—good morning.” Halo interrupted her father’s diatribe to greet Lewis Tarrant, who came lounging in from the verandah, followed by George Frenside munching his eternal cigar. “Good morning, Frenny⁠—if it’s still morning? Are you all coming to assist at my execution?” she laughed. + 

“We want to hear the argument for the defence,” Frenside retorted, in his deep voice with the queer crack in it. + 

“Isn’t any. I plead guilty. I had the car out in the small hours, and busted her coming down the Thundertop road. I had to get home on my own feet, and that’s all.” + 

“All⁠—all? You say it was you who was out in the car in the middle of the night?” Mr. Spear swung round on young Tarrant. “Lewis⁠—was she?” + 

Lewis Tarrant’s fair complexion, which so curiously matched his very fair and very clear light gray eyes, grew sallow with surprise and embarrassment. + 

“I⁠—why, of course, sir, if she says so,” he stammered. + 

“ ‘Says so’? Were you with her⁠—or weren’t you? If you weren’t she’s only shielding her brother for the hundredth time; and God knows where the car’s gone to, by this time.” + 

“Send Jacob up the road to see,” Héloïse interrupted impatiently. She had meant to carry the thing off with a light hand, laughing at them all, turning the affair into a good story to be served up to future guests; they were great, at Eaglewood, on collecting good stories for social purposes. But she had been put off her balance by the expression of Lewis Tarrant’s face, the intonation of his voice. Evidently he too supposed she was lying to shield her brother, and like the gentleman he was he was going to shield her; and the business was not in the least to his liking. (“Well, he knows what we’re like; why does he keep on coming here?” she thought, almost putting the question aloud to him.) She swung away from both men with one of her quick rebellious movements. + 

“And now, for goodness’ sake, Father, don’t go on keeping everybody waiting for lunch. Their interest in this affair is purely one of politeness. They don’t care a hang who had the car out last night, and they know it’s not the first time she’s broken down, especially when I’ve been driving her.” + 

“No⁠—as to that, sir, Halo’s right, you know,” Tarrant corroborated laughingly, and at the same moment Mrs. Spear appeared, her face brightening as she caught the echo of the laugh. But her exhilaration did not last. “I do think, Halo, we ought to have invited the Tracys here long ago,” she began, the lines forming again about her eyes and mouth. + 

“The Tracys⁠—the Tracys⁠—who on earth do you mean by the Tracys?” Mr. Spear broke in, glad of a new vent for his irritation. “Not Tom Lorburn’s caretakers at the Willows, I take it?” + 

“Why, you know, Harold, the Tracys really are related to Tom Lorburn and me, and I’m afraid we’ve been dreadfully distant to them, never going near them except to see whether they’d looked after the Willows properly⁠—and now Halo says they have a young cousin from the West staying there⁠—a painter, no, I mean a poet, who’s really a genius. And so I thought⁠ ⁠…” + 

Mrs. Spear’s confused explanation was interrupted by the convulsive splutter and angry pause of a motor outside of the house. So familiar were the sounds to all present that Héloïse merely said with a shrug: “What did I tell you?” and turned toward the dining room door, in the hope that the sight of food would cut short the investigation of her nocturnal trip. + 

“Well, Jacob?” Mr. Spear exclaimed, pausing halfway across the hall; and his daughter, turning, met the reproachful gaze of the family factotum, who stood in the doorway mopping the moisture from his perpetually puzzled wrinkles. + 

“Well, I’ve got her,” Jacob said. He glanced about him somewhat apprehensively, and then, fixing his eyes again on Héloïse: “I found a fellow sitting in her. He said he’d lost his way and gone to sleep. He was going to cut and run, but I told him he’d have to come here with me and tell you folks what he was doing in the car anyhow.” + 

Jacob fell back, and over his shoulder Héloïse caught sight of a slim boyish figure with white face and rumpled hair, and deep eyes still bewildered with sleep. + 

“Is this Eaglewood?” Vance Weston asked of the assembled company; then he saw Miss Spear behind the others, and his pallor turned to crimson. + 

Halo came forward. “Vance⁠—how wonderful. Mother was just asking why I hadn’t brought you back to lunch; and here you are!” + 

He looked at her as if only half understanding. “I couldn’t find my way home, so I came back up the road, and when I saw the car was still there I got into it to wait until somebody came along⁠—and I guess I must have fallen asleep.” + 

“Well, that’s all right; it’s even providential. You’ve saved Jacob the trouble of going all the way down the hill to get you. Mother, Father, this is Vance Weston, who’s staying at Paul’s Landing with the Tracys. Mother, can’t we have something to eat? You’ve no idea how inhumanly hungry sunrises make people⁠—don’t they, Vance? Oh, and this is Mr. Frenside, whom I’ve told you about: who writes for The Hour. And this is Mr. Lewis Tarrant⁠—and here’s my brother Lorburn. I suppose you’re our cousin, too, aren’t you, Vance? Lorry, this is our new cousin, Vance Weston.” + 

As she performed this rapid ceremony Halo’s eyes dwelt a moment longer on Lewis Tarrant’s face than on the others. Ah, he was taking his dose now⁠—a nasty brew! “Shielding” her again; much she cared about being shielded! He would know now that she really had been out in the car in the night, that this unknown boy had been with her, that she didn’t care a fig who knew it, and that the escapade had taken place at the very moment when he, Lewis Tarrant, had come to Eaglewood for the weekend, on her express promise that she would tell him definitely, before the end of his visit, if she were going to marry him or not.⁠ ⁠… + 

Lorry Spear was the first to break the silence which had followed on young Weston’s entrance. “I see that our new cousin has done us the doubtful service of preventing that rotten old car from being stolen. At least we might have collected the insurance on her.⁠ ⁠… Glad to see you all the same, Weston; don’t bear you the least grudge.” He held out his hand to the increasingly bewildered Vance. + 

“How absurd, Lorry⁠ ⁠… as if anybody had really thought⁠ ⁠…” Mrs. Spear broke in, the cloud lifting from her brow as she saw that her son was helping to carry the thing off (he didn’t always; but when he did he was masterly). + 

“And all this time, my dear Vance,” Mrs. Spear continued turning her beautiful eyes on her guest, “you must be wondering what we’re all talking about, and why lunch is so late. But it’s providential, as Halo says; for we shouldn’t have had the pleasure of having you with us if that stupid old motor hadn’t broken down. Now come into the dining room, my dear boy, this way. I’m going to put you next to Mr. Frenside, our great critic, whom you know by reputation⁠—of course you read The Hour? George, this is Halo’s friend, the young novelist⁠ ⁠… no, poet⁠ ⁠… poet, isn’t it, Vance? You happy being!” Mrs. Spear laid her urgent hand on his shoulder and drew him toward the luncheon table. + 

XI + 

It was so still in the dim book-lined room that had the late Miss Lorburn reappeared upon the scene she might have mistaken for a kindred ghost the young man in possession of her library. + 

Vance, for the last few days, had been going over the books at the Willows, wiping them with a soft towel and carefully putting one after another back in its proper place. Halo Spear, in one of her spasmodic bursts of energy, had swooped down from Eaglewood the first morning to show him how to do it; for in the reverent and orderly treatment of books (handling them, Mrs. Weston might have put it, as gingerly as if they were “the best china”!) Vance was totally untaught. Miss Spear, with those swift and confident hands of hers, had given him one of her hurried demonstrations, accompanied by a running commentary of explanation. “Don’t shake the books as if they were carpets, Vance; they’re not. At least they’re only magic carpets, some of them, to carry one to the other side of the moon. But they won’t stand banging and beating. You see, books have souls, like people: that is, like a few people.⁠ ⁠… No, I wouldn’t ask the Tracys to help; they don’t know much about books. You and I will manage it by ourselves. Look: wipe the edges gently, like this, and then flutter the pages ever so lightly⁠—as if you were a bee trying to shake open a flower⁠—just to get the dust out.⁠ ⁠… Ah, but how lovely this is! Listen: + 

“ ‘Ah, what avails the sceptred race, + 

And what the form divine? + 

What every virtue, every grace? + 

Rose Aylmer, all were thine⁠ ⁠…’ ” + 

And then, in the midst of her dusting and reading (the former frequently interrupted by the latter), she had glanced abruptly at her wristwatch, exclaiming: “Oh, Lord, there’s Lewis waiting⁠—I’d forgotten!” and had dashed out of the house, crying back advice, instructions and adieux. + 

Vance scarcely noticed her departure. It was exciting⁠—almost too exciting⁠—to have her there; but he did not want more excitement just then. What he wanted was in some way to be kept outside of time and space till his fury of intellectual hunger was, not indeed sated, but at least calmed. The mere sense of all those books about him, silent witnesses of an unknown and unsuspected past, was almost more agitating than he could bear. From every side their influences streamed toward him, drawing him this way and that as if he had been in the centre of a magnetic circle. To continue the work he was there to do soon became manifestly impossible. Why, even Miss Spear had broken off every few minutes to read and admire, often dropping the book in her hand while she darted on to another, oblivious, in her hummingbird greed, of the principles of order she was inculcating. And yet to her these volumes, or the greater number of them, were old friends. She must long since have surmounted the shock of surprises with which Vance was tingling; while to him nearly all the books were new and unknown, and the rest bore names just familiar enough to sharpen his hunger. How could he attempt to remember from which shelf he had taken one book or the other, once it had opened its golden vistas to him? + 

He did not try for long. He already had a fairly definite sense of values, and could not delude himself with the idea that dusting a dead woman’s books was, for him or anybody else, a more vital and necessary act than reading them. This was his chance, and he was going to take it. + 

If only he had known better how to! The pressure of this weight of wisdom on his ignorance was suffocating: he felt like a girl Miss Spear had told him about, the girl who was so greedy for gold that she betrayed Rome, and the fellows she betrayed it to despised her so that they crushed her under their golden shields. These books were crushing Vance like that. If only there were some way of climbing the slippery trunk of the Tree which dangled its fruit so far above him! + 

He turned to the corner from which Miss Spear had taken the books, and his hand lit on a shabby volume: Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Contemporary with Shakespeare. He settled himself in Miss Lorburn’s Gothic armchair and read: + 

“Is this the face that launched a thousand ships + 

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” + 

My God! Who wrote it? Who could have? Not any of the big fellows he knew about⁠ ⁠… this was another note: he knew it instinctively. And the man’s name? Marlowe⁠ ⁠… and he’d lived, why, ever so long ago, two or three hundred years before this old house of Miss Lorburn’s was built, or the funny old mouldy Half Hours book published⁠—and the English language, in this Marlowe’s hands, was already a flower and a flame.⁠ ⁠… Vance rambled on from glory to glory, slowly, amazedly, and then, out of sheer gluttony, pushed the book under his chair, like a dog hiding a bone, and wandered back to the magic shelves for more. + 

“When she moves, you see + 

Like water from a crystal overflowed, + 

Fresh beauty tremble out of her, and lave + 

Her fair sides to the ground⁠ ⁠…” + 

Vance dropped the little volume, and pressing his hands against his eyes let the frail music filter through him. This poetry had another quality of newness quite its own⁠—something elusive as the shy beauty of a cold spring evening. Beddoes⁠ ⁠… that was the name. Another unknown! Was he a contemporary of those others, Marlowe and Ford, who lived so long before the Willows was built, almost before the Hudson River had a name? Or was he not, rather with an exquisite new note, trying to lure back the earlier music? How could a boy from Euphoria hope to find his way through this boundless forest of English poetry, called hither and thither by all these wild-winged birds pouring down their music on him? + 

As he stood groping and gazing, in the litter and confusion of the ravaged shelves, his eyes fell on a title which seemed to hold out help. Half Hours with the Best Authors⁠—stoutish volumes in worn black cloth, with queer pinnacled gilt lettering. Well, at least they would tell him who were supposed to be the best authors when the book was written⁠—put him wise on that, anyhow. He reached for a volume, and settled himself down again. + 

The book was not, as Vance had expected, a series of “half hour” essays on the best authors. Charles Knight (that was the man’s name) had simply ranged through a library like Miss Lorburn’s, about eighty years ago, gathered this bloom and that, and bound them together with the fewest words. Vance, accustomed to shortcuts to culture, had expected an early version of the “five-foot shelf”; he found, instead, the leisurely selections of an anthologist to whom it had obviously not occurred that he might have readers too hurried to dwell on the more recondite beauties of English literature. The choice of the poetry did not greatly interest Vance, after Lamb’s Specimens and the Beddoes volume; but as his eye travelled on he found himself receiving for the first time⁠—except when he had first read his Bible as literature⁠—the mighty shock of English prose. + 

For the moment it affected him almost more powerfully than the poetry, such a sense it gave of endlessly subtle intricacies of rhythm and movement, such a great tidal pressure as he could feel only, and not define. “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle nursing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unsealing her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance.⁠ ⁠…” “The light of the world in the turning of the creation was spread abroad like a curtain, and dwelt nowhere, but filled the expansum with a dissemination great as the unfoldings of the air’s looser garment, or the wilder fringes of the fire, without knots, or order, or combination; but God gathered the beams in his hand, and united them into a globe of fire, and all the light of the world became the body of the sun.” + 

What a fellow could say, if he had the chance, and the habit of words and sentences like that! + 

Vance shut the volume and sat gazing ahead of him. The blood was beating in his temples. The walls of dark musty books seemed to sway and dissolve, letting him into that new world of theirs⁠—a world of which he must somehow acquire the freedom. “I must find out⁠—I must find out.” He repeated the words chantingly, unmeaningly, as if they had been an incantation. Then slowly his mind began to clear, to become again able to follow its own movements. What he needed, no doubt, to enter that world, was education⁠—the very thing he thought he already had! + 

It was not only the books into which he had been dipping that told him of his need. Every word, every allusion caught at the Eaglewood lunch table had opened new vistas of conjecture. Of course each human agglomeration, down to the smallest village, had its local idioms, its own range of allusions, its stock of jokes and forms of irony. At the Tracys’, for instance, you heard the Paul’s Landing vernacular, as you heard that of Euphoria at Vance’s family table; but all that was different. Vance had known instantly that the language, the intonations, the allusions of Eaglewood did not belong peculiarly to Paul’s Landing, were indeed hardly concerned with it, but embraced, though so lightly flitting, great areas extending not only to New York and beyond, but backward through this mysterious past which was so much newer to Vance than any present. These easy affable people could talk⁠—did talk⁠—about everything! Everything, that is, but the exclusively local matters which had formed the staple of the only conversation Vance had ever heard. What they talked of was simply all the rest; and he could see that they did it without the least intention of showing-off, the least consciousness that their scope was wider than other people’s⁠—did it naturally, carelessly, just as his mother talked about electric cookers, his father about local real estate, Mrs. Tracy about Laura Lou’s school picnics and Upton’s job at the nursery. The inference was, not that the Spears and their friends were an isolated group, parading their superior attainments before each other, but that they belonged to a class, a society, a type of people, who naturally breathed this larger air, possessed this privilege of moving freely backward and forward in time and space, and were so used to it all that they took the same faculty for granted in others⁠—even in a boy like Vance Weston. + 

Well, there was no reason why a boy like Vance Weston shouldn’t, some day or other, acquire a like faculty. He had been brought up in the creed that there was nothing a fellow from Euphoria, the cradle of all the Advantages, couldn’t attain to. Only⁠—how? It seemed to him that the gulf was untraversable. If only he could have been left alone in that library, left there for half a year, perhaps.⁠ ⁠… But even so, he felt that he needed some kind of tuition to prepare him for the library. The Past was too big, too complicated, too aloof, to surrender its secrets so lightly. + 

College again? College meant to him sports and more sports, secret societies, class scraps and fraternity rushing, with restricted intervals of mechanical cramming, and the glib unmeaning recital of formulas⁠—his courses provided a formula for everything! But all that had nothing to do with all this.⁠ ⁠… + 

Besides, thinking about college was a waste of time. Even had he been willing to submit again to the same routine, he hadn’t the means to re-educate himself, and he could not ask his father to pay his expenses twice over. Mr. Weston, Vance knew, regarded him as an investment which ought already to be bringing in something. After the boy’s illness his father had recognized the necessity of his taking a holiday; and being a man who always did things handsomely when his doing so was visible to others, he had agreed, besides paying the trip to New York and back, and Vance’s board at the Tracys’, to allow him a hundred dollars a month for four months. Vance had received half the sum before starting, with a warning to be careful and not make a fool of himself; and his father’s gesture, which became generally known on Mapledale Avenue, was thought very liberal, and worthy of Lorin Weston. + 

But Vance, at the same time, was given to understand that as soon as his summer’s rest was over he was to “make good.” His father, having reluctantly come round to the idea of his going into journalism instead of real estate, had obtained the promise of a job for him on the Free Speaker, and was already swaggering at club meetings about the nuisance of having a literary fellow in the family. “Problem most of you fellows aren’t up against, I guess? Fact is, Mrs. Weston has a way-back culture complex in her family, and it’s a microbe you can’t seem to eradicate.” This was all very well⁠—and nobody liked swaggering better than the silent Lorin Weston; but Vance knew that he liked to have his swagger justified with the least possible delay. + 

The only hope lay in returning as often as he could to this silent room, and trying to hack a way through the dense jungle of the past. But he was not sure it would be possible. He was aware that Mrs. Tracy, though she made no comment, wondered at his meetings with Miss Spear at the Willows, and at the permission given him to range among the books. He had spent two whole days there since his lunch at Eaglewood, and on this second day no one had come down from the “big house,” as Mrs. Tracy called it, to let him in, and he had been obliged to go back to Paul’s Landing and ask her for the keys. “I don’t know as I ought to,” Mrs. Tracy had said as she handed them over; and then: “Oh, well, I suppose it’s all right if they say so.” She referred to the Spears as “they,” with a certain tartness, since she had learned of Vance’s having lunched at Eaglewood. “Well, I never! Mebbe some time they’ll remember that Upton and Laura Lou are related to them too.” Vance felt that in asking for the keys he had vaguely offended her, and he was sorry; but he could not give up the books. + 

New York had completely vanished from his thoughts. He had the sense to understand that, to a boy like himself, New York could offer no opportunity comparable to this. He must learn something first⁠—then try his luck there. When he had found himself, at the Eaglewood lunch table, seated next to the literary critic whose name, in his confusion, he had not caught, he had acted at once on the deep instinct which always made him seize on what was meant for his own nourishment, in however new and unfamiliar surroundings. Here, at least, he said to himself, was an editor⁠—a journalist! He had no idea if The Hour were a daily (as its name seemed to imply), or some kind of highbrow review (as he feared); but whatever it was, it might give him his chance⁠—and here he was sitting next to the very man who had the power to open its columns to him. + 

But he found it less easy than he had imagined. The great man (whom they all addressed simply as “George” or “Frenny”) was evidently trying to be friendly, in his dry sardonic way; but he paid no heed to Mrs. Spear’s allusions to “our young poet,” and his remarks to Vance were merely perfunctory questions as to his life in the West, and his present sojourn at the Tracys’. Once indeed he asked, blinking absently at the boy through his glasses: “And what’s the next move to be?” but on Vance’s answering: “I want to get onto a newspaper,” his interest seemed to flag. “Oh, of course,” he merely said, as who should imply; “What’s the use of expecting anything different in a world of sameness?” and the blood which had rushed to Vance’s face ebbed back to his heart. A few hours earlier, as he talked of his poetry with Halo Spear by the mountain pool, everything had seemed possible; now he thought bitterly: “When it comes down to hardpan girls don’t know anything anyhow.” And it gave him a grim satisfaction to class his mountain nymph in the common category. + 

But when she reminded him of his promise to help her with the books his feeling veered to adoration, and her appearance at the Willows, vivid and inspiring, instantly lifted him to the brow of Thundertop. “She carries that pool everywhere with her,” he thought, and was seized by the desire to embody the fancy in a new poem; and when she broke off in her dusting and sorting to say: “I gave your poetry to George Frenside to read last night,” he was too much agitated to thank her, or to put a question. A moment later, she seemed to forget what she had said, carried away by a dip into Andrew Marvell (What⁠—he didn’t know “The Coy Mistress”? Oh, but he must just listen to this!); and finally, after whirling him on from one book to another for an hour or so, she vanished as suddenly as she had come to join the mysterious “Lewis,” the fellow she was going to marry, Vance supposed. + 

She came back the next day, and the next. On the fourth she promised to leave her keys with him and to meet him again at the Willows the next morning; but she carried the keys off with her, and he had to get the hired man, who scrutinized him sulkily, to lock up. And the fifth day there had been no sign of her⁠ ⁠… and now twilight would soon be falling, and it was time to go. + 

Show his poetry to George Frenside (if that was the man’s name)? Much chance he’d ever hear of that again⁠ ⁠… likely as not she’d never even done it; just meant to, and forgotten. For if she had, wouldn’t she have had something to report⁠—even if unfavourable? It wasn’t likely she’d stick at telling him a few more home truths, after the stiff dose she’d already administered! Perhaps on second thoughts she’d decided the stuff wasn’t worth showing. And yet, hadn’t she told him in so many words that she had shown it? No, what she had said, literally, was: “I gave Frenside your poetry to read.” Well, the great critic probably hadn’t taken advantage of his opportunity⁠—perhaps she’d put him off in advance with her comments. “Urge” not a noun! And that nonsense about “dawn” and “lorn” not being good rhymes! God, to see a tone-deaf woman laying down the law⁠—and all Eaglewood kowtowing! Well, he had to laugh at the thought of those stuffed oracles sitting up there and telling each other what was what.⁠ ⁠… What the hell’d he care for their opinion, anyhow⁠—of his poetry, or of himself? Lot of self-opiniated amateurs⁠ ⁠… he had to laugh.⁠ ⁠… Well, he’d go to New York the next day, and look round on his own, and see what the professionals thought about him.⁠ ⁠… After all, he could describe himself as being on the staff of the Free Speaker. + 

Suddenly a shadow cut off the western sunlight slanting on his book, and he saw one of the young men from Eaglewood leaning on the window and looking in at him⁠—not the fair dissatisfied-looking one they called “Lewis,” but the other: Halo’s brother Lorburn. Lorburn Spear put his hand on the sill, said “Hullo⁠—still at it?” and vaulted into the room. In the middle of the floor he paused, his hands in his pockets, and gazed about with an amused smile and ironically lifted brows. He was slim and dark, like Halo, with the same carefully drawn features as his father, but more height and less majesty than Mr. Spear. An easy accessible sort of fellow; a fellow Vance felt he could have taken a liking to if only⁠—if what? Perhaps it was that his eyes were too close together. Grandma Scrimser always used to say: “Don’t you ever trust a man whose eyes are near enough to be always whispering to each other.” And then she went and trusted everybody⁠—even Grandpa! Fact was, Grandma liked axioms the way you like olives; it never occurred to her they were meant for anything but to roll under your tongue.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Well,” said Lorry Spear pleasantly, “this is luck, finding you still in the mausoleum. I suppose Halo set you the job and then chucked you? Thought so. She promised to pick me up by and by, but will she? Have you made any amusing finds? Cigarette? No?” He drew out his own, lit one, and dropped into the chair nearest Vance’s. “There ought to be things here, you know,” he went on sending his eyes sharply about him while his attention still seemed to be centred on Vance. + 

“Things?” Vance echoed excitedly: “I should say so! See here⁠—do you know this?” He pushed across the table the volume of Half Hours, open at Beddoes. Lorry Spear stared, took the book up, glanced at the title page and threw it down. “Well⁠—I don’t believe there’d be any bids for that unless it took the ragpicker’s fancy.” + 

“The ragpicker⁠—?” + 

The young men stared at each other, and Lorry laughed. + 

“Oh, I see: you’re a reader. Halo told me. It’s a conceivable branch of the business, of course.” + 

“Business⁠—?” + 

“Business of book-collecting. That’s what books are for, isn’t it? Even people who read ’em have to collect them. But personally I’ve never thought they were meant to be read. You can get all the talk you want⁠—and too much⁠—from live people; I never could see the point of dragging in the dead. The beauty of books is their makeup: like a woman’s. What’s a woman without clothes and paint? Next to nothing, believe me, after you’ve worn off the first surprise.⁠ ⁠… And a book without the right paper, the right type, the right binding, the right date on the title page; well, it’s a blank to me, that’s all.” He got up again, cigarette in hand, and lounged across the room. “Don’t suppose there’s much here, anyhow. I’ve always meant to take a look, and never had time.⁠ ⁠… There might be some Americana⁠—never can tell. The best thing about these ancestors was that they never threw anything away. Didn’t value things; didn’t know about them; but just hung on to them. I shouldn’t wonder⁠—Oh, see here! Hullo!” He stretched his long arm toward an upper shelf, reached down a volume, and stood absorbed. + 

Vance watched him curiously. He had never seen anyone so easy, self-assured, and yet careless as this brother of Miss Spear’s. “Thought you didn’t care about reading,” he remarked at length, amused at his visitor’s absorption. Young Spear gave a start, and laid the book down. “Oh, I was turning out paradoxes⁠—they madden my family, but amuse me. Trouble about reading at Eaglewood is that whatever you get hold of everybody’s been there before you. No discoveries to be made. But you don’t read, do you⁠—you write? You’ll find nobody can do both. What’s your line? Poetry?” + 

Vance was trembling with excitement, as he always did when anyone touched on his vocation. But his recent experiences had caused a sort of protective skin to grow over his secret sensibilities⁠—or was it that really the eyes of this good-looking young man were too close together? Vance could imagine having all kinds of a good time with him, but not talking to him of anything that lay under that skin. “Oh, I guess there’ll be time for me to choose a line later,” he said. “I’m in the reading stage still. And this old house interests me. Where I come from everything’s bran’ new⁠—houses and books and everything. We throw ’em out when they get shabby. And I like looking at all these things that folks have kept right along⁠—hung onto, as you say.” + 

Lorburn Spear looked at him with interest, with sympathy even, Vance thought. For a second his smile had the fugitive radiance of his sister’s. “Why, yes, I see your point: what you might call the novelty of permanence. And this place certainly has character, though old Tom Lorburn is too stupid to see it. And our Cousin Elinor had character too! Good head, eh?” He glanced up at the portrait, still with that odd air of keeping hold of Vance while he looked away from him. “You know she did a good deal to the house when she inherited it. This room expresses one side of her; her maturity, her acceptance. But when she did the drawing rooms she was frivolous, she still dreamed of dancing⁠—she’d read Byron on the waltz, poor girl! What an appetizer it must have been to those women to have so many things forbidden! Seen the rest of the rooms? No? Oh, but they’re worth it. Come along before it gets too dark.” + 

Gaily, with his long free step, he led the way across the patterned parquet, and Vance followed, captivated by the image of a young Miss Lorburn who still dreamed of dancing, and to whom so many things were sweet because forbidden. “Yet she ended in her library.⁠ ⁠…” he thought. + 

Lorry Spear was a stimulating guide. His quick touches woke the dumb rooms to life, lit the dusky wax candles in chandeliers and wall brackets, drew a Weber waltz from the slumbering piano, peopled the floor with gaily circling couples, even made Vance see the dotted muslins and billowy tarlatans looped with camellias of the young women with their ringlets and sandalled feet. He found the cleverest words, made it all visible and almost tangible, knew even what flowers there would have been in the ornate porcelain vases: mignonette and pinks, with heavy pink roses, he decided: “Yes⁠—I ought to have been a theatrical decorator; would be, if only the boss would put up the cash. But to do that they’d have to sell Eaglewood⁠—or marry Halo to a millionaire,” he added with an impatient laugh. + 

Upstairs he took Vance over the funny bedrooms, so big and high-ceilinged, with beds of mahogany or rosewood, and the lace-looped toilet tables (like the ladies’ ball-dresses) with gilt mirror frames peeping through the festoons, and big marble-topped washstands that carried carafes and goblets of cut glass, porcelain basins and ewers with flower garlands. In one of the dressing rooms (Miss Lorburn’s) there was a specially ornate toilet set, with a ewer in the shape of a swan with curving throat and flattened wings, and a basin like a nest of rushes. “Poor Elinor⁠—I supposed she dreamed of a Lohengrin before the letter, and hoped to find a baby in the bulrushes,” Lorry commented; and Vance, understanding the allusions, felt a pang of sympathy for the lonely woman. At the end of the passage, in one of the freakish towers, was a circular room with blue brocade curtains and tufted furniture, the walls hung with large coloured lithographs of peasant girls dancing to tambourines, and young fellows in breeches and velvet jackets who drove oxcarts laden with ripe grapes. “The Italy of her day,” Lorry smiled. “She must have done this boudoir in the Lohengrin stage. And she ended in spectacles, cold and immaculate, reading Coleridge all alone. Brr!” He broke off, and turned to the window. “Hullo! Isn’t that Halo?” + 

The hoarse bark of the Eaglewood motor sounded at the gate. “Come along down,” Lorry continued. “You’d better take advantage of the lift home. Besides, it’s too dark to do much more here.” + 

They started down the stairs, but in the hall Vance hesitated. “I’ve left the books piled up anyhow. Guess I’d better go back and put them on the shelves.” He realized suddenly that for the last two days he had done neither dusting nor sorting, and wondered what Miss Spear would say if she saw the havoc he had created. + 

“Not on your life!” Lorry enjoined him. “You could hardly see a yard before your nose in the library by this time, and lighting up is strictly forbidden. Might set the old place on fire. If it was mine I’d do it, and collect the insurance; but old Tom don’t need to, curse him.” He stopped short, and clapped his hand on his waistcoat pocket. “I must have left my cigarette case in there. Yes, I remember. You wait here⁠—” + 

He spun down the polished floor of the drawing-rooms and disappeared. Vance waited impatiently. Although the June sky outside was still full of daylight it was dark already in the hall with its sombre panelling and heavy oak stairs. Now and then he heard the croak of the Eaglewood motor and he wondered how much longer Miss Spear would deign to wait. Between the motor calls the silence was oppressive. What could young Spear have done with his cigarette case? Once Vance thought he heard the banging of a window in the distance. Could it be that he had forgotten to close the windows in the library? But he was sure he had not; and the sound took on the ghostly resonance of unexplained noises. Perhaps that silly Laura Lou was right to be scared⁠—as dusk fell it became easier to believe that the Willows might be haunted. Vance started back across the echoing parquet to the library; but halfway he met Lorry returning. + 

“Couldn’t find the damn thing,” he grumbled. “Got the keys, eh?” Vance said he had, and they moved toward the door. On the threshold Lorry paused, and turned to him again with Halo’s smile. “You haven’t got ten dollars you don’t know what to do with? Like a fool I let Lewis and Frenside keep me up half the night playing poker.⁠ ⁠… Well, that’s white of you. Thanks. Settle next week. And don’t mention it to Halo, will you? The old people are down on poker⁠ ⁠… and on everything else I want to do.” Vance turned the key in the front door, and the two walked through the long grass to the gate. + 

Vance felt grown-up and important. It put him at his ease with Lorry’s sister to have a secret between men to keep from her. + 