"I remember. You know, I think I went there that time because I heard you were playing there." He was silent a moment, pitching bits of sod into the river. "There is something that manages these things. If I had met you then we couldn't have been like this. And we might never have met again." When he said "like this," he had touched my knee with his hand with that possessive intimacy with which a man may touch his own woman. I had to go back to the photographs of the children to save myself from the blinding lightning of his eyes. "_Are_ they like their mother?" "I suppose so. I hope so--she was a good woman." "I'm sure of that." He sat up with intention. "Ah, it isn't just a sense of what is due her that makes me say that. She was thoroughly good. When I met her out in Idaho she was my chief's daughter and the only nice girl in the place. She wasn't what you are--no other woman is--but she was one of those plain, quiet women that have a kind of a grip on rightness. There was nothing could make her let go." "My mother was like that. I think I can understand." "Well, it was mighty good for me. I'm a bad lot, I suppose. I always want things harder than most, and I think the wanting justifies me in getting them, but she taught me better. She did things to me that made me fit for you, and I don't want us to forget that." "Oh, my dear, it is I who am not fit." But I could see he did not believe that. He had come upon me that day in the woods when happily the mood of Perdita had shut round the odd, blundering Olivia like an enchanter's bubble, through which iridescent surfaces he was always to see me; and by the mere act of loving he had fixed me in my happiest moment. He was the only man I ever knew, whom I could handle like an audience, perhaps he was the only man who never knew me in any other character than the lady of romance. We went that evening to see Beerbohm Tree in a Shakespearian piece, always so much more worth while in London than anything the same people can do on any other soil, as if the play had mellowed there by all the rich life it tapped with its four-hundred-year roots. Borne up by my mood and the beauty of the production, so much greater than anything we could manage in New York at that time, I was chanting bits of it all the way home, and when we came to my room again I moved before him in the part of Egypt's queen. "Who's born the day When I forget to send to Antony Shall die a beggar----" "Oh, Helmeth, if you could just see me do it!" I was aching to lay up my gift before him as on an altar. "You shall do them all for me when we are out in the shack in Mexico." "Mexico!" I was blank for the moment. "We'll have to live there for a few years, until I get this scheme on its legs. Look here, Olivia, you haven't said yet when you are going to marry me." "I've only known you four days!" I tried for the note of feminine evasion.