“I’ve been a bond-slave so long,” said Lena, “that I’d like to feel perfectly free and mistress of everything around me.” She straightened her back and squared her soft shoulders.
“So you shall be!” answered Dick happily. “Even of your husband.”
“Oh, that, of course,” said Lena with an enchanting pout. “Now here we are, and it’s very late. You must go. Good night.”
“Good night,” said Dick. “I suppose I must not keep you. To think I have the unbelievable good fortune to kiss you good night, sweetheart.”
Mrs. Quincy turned over in the lumpy bed which she and her daughter shared and said, with a querulousness undiminished by her sleepiness, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Lena Quincy, gallivanting around at this hour of night. It ain’t decent. But there!”
“I guess I know my business,” Lena snapped.
She turned out the gas to undress in the dark rather than encourage her mother’s conversation. She needed to think. An awful problem had just presented itself. How was she to get a trousseau?
It was in another mood that Dick Percival walked home. Whenever anything very great and wonderful happens to us, we are apt to bow our heads and cry, “What am I, that this should be given to me?” Doubtless he is the noblest man who most often feels this exultant humility. This was Dick’s hour on the mountain. The depth of his own tenderness, the deliciousness of his passion swept over him like a revelation, as he asked himself in wonder how it could be that this love had sprung up at once, like Aphrodite from the waves, where no one could have suspected such a marvel. He himself had been without realization of how his passing interest had deepened its roots until now they fed on every part of him. Love had startled him like a stroke of lightning out of a clear sky, but it was evident that it was no light that flashed out and then disappeared. It had come to stay.
Then came self-reproach. He remembered with hot cheeks that he had actually joked with Ellery about her in early days, and let himself be bantered in return—cad that he was, incapable of appreciating at first sight the woman he was to love. He had thought her an exquisite trifle, almost too illusive to be taken seriously. Now that very illusiveness was the thing that gripped him closest, like poetry and music and all the finer elements of life, the most impossible to explain, the most supreme in their dominion. Beauty meant all this. He found himself repeating, “Beauty is truth. Truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” And Lena was beautiful. How beautiful! He trembled in flesh and spirit at the vision of her face turned up to him out of the black November darkness, at the memory of the fine texture of her cheeks and lips.
He did not stop to ask himself whether he and Keats were agreed in their definition of beauty. Moreover, poor Keats never had the delight of anything so pink and golden and blue-eyed as Lena Quincy.