BUT if I was wrought up by the varying aspects of the city, I was equally wrought up by the delights of love, which came for the first time fully with the arrival of Alice. Was I in love with her? No, as I understand myself now. I doubt that I have ever been in love with any one, or with anything save life as a whole. Twice or thrice I have developed stirring passions but always there was a voice or thought within which seemed to say over and over, like a bell at sea: “What does it matter? Beauty is eternal.... Beauty will come again!” But this thing, _life_, this picture of effort, this colorful panorama of hope and joy and despair—that _did_ matter! Beauty, like a tinkling bell, the tintings of the dawn, the whispering of gentle winds and waters in summer days and Arcadian places, was in everything and everywhere. Indeed the appeal of this local life was its relationship to eternal perfect beauty. That it should go! That never again, after a few years, might I see it more! That love should pass! That youth should pass! That in due time I should stand old and grizzled, contemplating with age-filmed eyes joys and wonders whose sting and color I could no longer feel or even remember—out on it for a damned tragedy and a mirthless joke! Alice proved to be in love with me. She lived in a two-flat frame house in what was then the far middle-south section of the city, a region about Fifty-first and Halsted streets. Her foster-father was a railroad watchman, and had saved up a few thousand dollars by years of toil. This little apartment represented his expenditures plus her taste, such as it was: a simple little place, with red plush curtains shielding a pair of folding-doors which separated two large rooms front and back. There were lace curtains and white shades at the windows, a piano (a most soothing luxury for me to contemplate), and then store furniture: a red velvet settee, a red plush rocker, several other new badly designed chairs. Quaint little soul! How cheery and dreamful and pulsating with life she was when I met her! Her suitor, as I afterwards came to know, was a phlegmatic man of thirty-five, who had found in her all that he desired and was eager to marry her, as he eventually did. He was wont to call regularly on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, taking her occasionally to a theater or to dinner downtown. When I arrived on the scene I must have disrupted all this, for after a time, because I manifested some opposition, leaving her no choice indeed, Wednesdays and Sundays became my evenings, and any others that I chose. Regardless of my numerous and no doubt asinine defects, she was in love with me and willing to accept me on my own terms.