it for a way of death. Reality was behind us.

Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not so

sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all,

that agricultural work isn't good for women."

"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous

cursing of all I held dear. "Fettered things we are!" I cried. "I

wonder why I stand it!"

"Stand what?"

"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world

and you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs-and

we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in

us!…"

"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with

a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque

scenery is altogether good for your morals."

That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.

13

Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume

and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly

because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station

that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of

the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or

four days' sojourn in the Empress Hotel.

We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an

Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in

the hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or

thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very

abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-

faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over

his coffee and presently went to bed. "He always goes to bed like

that," she confided startlingly. "He sleeps after all his meals. I

never knew such a man to sleep."

Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.

We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual

topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. "My

husband doesn't walk," she said. "His heart is weak and he cannot

manage the hills."

There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she

conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to

write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones.

I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people

one has never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved

beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in

my voice made her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as

I can remember I said she made them bold. "Blue they are," she

remarked, smiling archly. "I like blue eyes." Then I think we

compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, "George

Moore's Woman of Thirty."

I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to

understand.

That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling

good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and

Willersley went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of

her, and I found it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a

problem in sociology. "Who the deuce are these people?" I said, and

how do they get a living? They seem to have plenty of money. He

strikes me as being-Willersley, what is a drysalter? I think he's

a retired drysalter."

Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that

provocative quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at

lunch she and I met like old friends. A huge mass of private

thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one

another. We talked for a time of insignificant things.

"What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after lunch? Take a

siesta?"

"Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.

We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a

steamer propeller when it lifts out of the water.

"Do you get a view from your room?" she asked after a pause.

"It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My

friend's next door."

She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian

Science, she said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what

that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost

exactness the purplish magenta of its cover. She said she would

lend it to me and hesitated.

Wlllersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that

afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I

rejected abruptly. " I shall write in my room," I said.

"Why not write down here?"

"I shall write in my room," I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he

looked at me curiously. "Very well," he said; "then I'll make some

notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias."

I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and

feverishly restless, watching the movements of the other people.

Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring

out. There came a little tap at the unlocked door and in an

instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it open.

"Here is that book," she said, and we hesitated.

"COME IN!" I whispered, trembling from head to foot.

"You're just a boy," she said in a low tone.

I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the

safe-door nearly opened. "Come in," I said almost impatiently, for

anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her