"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.