Utterly anticipated in the evening's call a pleasant experience. The wide landscape lay soft and beautiful in the moonlight, a panorama spread for his delectation. He called it, in the city-dweller's metaphor, a beautiful stage-set. After she had greeted him, Mrs. Bent went back to her work. Except for a few moments an hour later when she came out to put on the porch table a tray with a plate of cake and tinkling glasses, Utterly saw her no more. He regarded the young woman before him with a critical eye. She was beautiful, of that there was no question. She was talented also, and though she was still immature and provincial, she was not awkward or self-conscious. She accepted the announcement which he had come to make as quietly as any of the older, more sophisticated women with whom he associated would have accepted it. "I hope you are pleased." "Very much," answered Eleanor in a quiet voice which belied the tumult within. It seemed to her that she could hardly breathe. "And you will keep on writing?" "Oh, _yes_!" said Eleanor. "You keep notebooks, I suppose, and record all your impressions?" "Yes." "And you read a great deal?" "Yes." "How do you mean to get new impressions? Are you going to stay here?" Utterly's voice now disparaged Waltonville. "I had not thought of going away," said Eleanor. "I have just graduated to-day and I haven't any particular plans." "You and your mother are alone?" "Yes." "Couldn't you have a winter in New York?" "I had thought that sometime I might go to Boston," said Eleanor. Utterly sniffed the air. He had, he said, little opinion of Boston as an experience. Boston was of the past. No one got experience of anything but the past there, and the past one ought to try to get away from. "A writer must have stimulation," he went on. "A woman's talent is, in far greater degree than a man's, dependent upon outside influences; it is far less self-nourished and self-originated; she must have life, though not too much life, and she must hold herself in a measure separate from it." Utterly added to this sage prescription a "don't you know," and Eleanor answered with a hesitating "yes." She was, in spite of her confusion, a little amused. Utterly had come half a day too late; had he presented himself last evening instead of this, he might have made a deeper impression.