The loves of Pelleas and Etarre

BY ZONA GALE New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1921 All rights reserved
Copyright, 1907, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1907.
Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
To MY FATHER AND MOTHER
The author hereby acknowledges the courtesy of the publishers of Appleton’s Magazine , The Cosmopolitan Magazine , The Delineator , Everybody’s Magazine , The Outlook , The Saturday Evening Post , The Smart Set , and The Woman’s Home Companion , in permitting the reprint here of the stories that originally appeared in their pages.
THE ODOUR OF THE OINTMENT
Ascension lilies were everywhere in our shabby drawing-room. They crowded two tables and filled a corner and rose, slim and white, atop a Sheraton cabinet. Every one had sent Pelleas and me a sheaf of the flowers—the Chartres, the Cleatams, Miss Willie Lillieblade, Enid, Lisa and dear Hobart Eddy had all remembered us on Easter eve, and we entered our drawing-room after breakfast on Easter morning to be all but greeted with a winding of the white trumpets. The sun smote them and they were a kind of candle, their light secretly diffused, premonitory of Spring, of some resurrection of light as a new element. It was a wonderful Easter day, and in spite of our sad gray hair Pelleas and I were never in fairer health; yet for the first time in our fifty years together Easter found us close prisoners. Easter morning, and we were forbidden to leave the house!
“Etarre,” Pelleas said, with some show of firmness, “there is no reason in the world why we should not go.”
“Ah, well now,” I said with a sigh, “I wish you could prove that to Nichola. Do I not know it perfectly already?”
It is one sign of our advancing years, we must suppose, that we are prone to predicate of each other the trifles which heaven sends. The sterner things we long ago learned to accept with our hands clasped in each other’s; but when the postman is late or the hot water is cold or we miss our paper we have a way of looking solemnly sidewise.