"Plenty," Peter satisfied him on that score. "I've been thinking," he let out shyly, "that if I could put the price of it in some place where I could watch it, the money would do me more good...."
Lessing turned on him a suddenly brightening eye.
"That's the talk—say, you know I think I could get you forty-five hundred for that farm of yours anyway." They looked at one another on the verge of things hopeful and considerable. As Peter's car swung around the curve, suddenly they blushed, both of them, and reached out and shook hands.
That evening as Peter came home he saw Lessing buying chrysanthemums at the florist's with a happy countenance, and to master the queer pang it gave him, Peter got off the car and walked a long way out on the dim wet pavement. He was looking at the bright picture of Lessing and the girl—she was really very pretty—and seeing instead, himself, quite the bachelor, and his lame sister taking their blameless dull way in the world. He couldn't any more for the life of him, get a picture of himself without Ellen in it; the tapping of her crutch sounded even in the House when he visited it in his dreams. It was well on this occasion that he had Ellen beside him, for she showed him the way presently to take it, as he knew she would take it as soon as he went home and told her—as another door by which they could enter sympathetically in the joyousness they were denied. She would be so pleased for Julian's sake, in whom, by Peter's account of him, she took the greatest interest, and so pleased for the girl to have such a handsome, capable lover. It made, for Ellen, a better thing of life if somebody could have him.
Peter went back after a while with that thought to the florist's and bought chrysanthemums, taking care to ask for the same kind Mr. Lessing had just ordered. He was feeling quite cheerful even, as he ran up the steps with them a few minutes later, and saw the square of light under the half-drawn curtain, and heard the tap of Ellen's crutch coming to meet him.
That night after he had gone to bed a very singular thing happened. The Princess out of the picture visited him. It was there at the foot of his bed in a new frame where Ellen had hung it—the young knight riding down the old, lumpy dragon, but with an air that Peter hadn't for a long time been able to manage for himself, doing a great thing easily the way one knew perfectly great things couldn't. The assistant sales manager of Siegel Brothers had been lying staring up at it for some time when the Princess spoke to him. He knew it was she, though there was no face nor form that he could remember in his waking hours, except that it was familiar.
"Ellen is right," she told him; "it doesn't really matter so long as somebody finds me."
"But what have I done?" Peter was sore with a sense of personal slight. "It wasn't in the story that there should be a whole crop of dragons."
"All dragons are made so that where one head comes off there are seven in its place; and you must remember if somebody didn't go about slaying them, I couldn't be at all." This as she said it had a deep meaning for Peter that afterward escaped him. "And you can hold the dream. It takes a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pass."
"I'm sick of dreams," said Peter. "A man dies after a little who is fed on nothing else."