“Wait a moment.” Helen’s face again became thoughtful. “I have it!” she cried, triumphantly. “‘The gardens of Sicily are empty now, but the bees still fetch honey from the golden jars of Theocritus.’ That is what you mean, is it not? I remember that from something of Lowell’s I read at school.”
“Splendid!” he laughed, with delight. “Who dares to say that you are not in sympathy with the past?” He bent his head down close to hers. “Would you not prefer to hold those ‘golden jars’ in your very hands, sweetheart, rather than merely read about them?”
“But, Jack, ‘the gardens of Sicily are empty now.’ Think how lonesome we should be.” Helen threw back her head and drew in a long breath of the exhilarating air.
Armstrong was still insistent. “I wish I could make you see it as I do,” he said. “The present of to-day is bound to be the past of to-morrow. What I want to do is to assimilate all that the past can give me, so that I may do my part, however small, toward giving it out again, made stronger and more effective because of its modern application, thus helping this present to become worthy of being considered by those who come after us.”
Helen looked up at him with undisguised admiration. “Oh, Jack, that sounds so wonderful, and I wish I could enter into it with you, but I simply cannot do it. Inez will be just the one. At school, as I told you, she went in for the classics and all that, while I—well, I was sent there to be ‘finished.’ Don’t look so disappointed, Jack. Truly I would if I could.”
“I shall not give you up yet,” he answered, smiling at Helen’s intensity, notwithstanding his genuine regret. “Tell me something more about Miss Thayer, since you insist upon her becoming your substitute.”
“Inez is a darling, in spite of her superiority,” Helen replied, gayly, “and I simply could not have been married without her for a bridesmaid. She would have sailed two weeks earlier except for our wedding. As it was, she came over with her cousins, and has been travelling with them until time to join us here at the villa.”
“De Peyster is still devoted, I judge?”
“Poor Ferdinand! His persistency has quite won my sympathy. He simply will not take ‘no’ for an answer, but travels back and forth between Boston and Philadelphia like any commercial traveller. Going over, he has a bunch of American Beauties under one arm and a box of bonbons under the other; returning, nothing but another refusal to add to those Inez has already given him.”
“He is not a bad sort of chap at all, when you get past his peculiarities,” Armstrong added.