Having settled my line of conduct toward the martial woman with the Pomeranian, I began my account of the years missing in our friendship. It was very brief. It is astonishing in how few words a man can sum up his life's accomplishment if he holds to the essential facts. Since that day when she had left the farm with Rufus Blight I had studied under Mr. Pound, spent four years in college and three years working on a newspaper. Was I successful in my work? she asked. Fairly so, I answered modestly. I might have told her that I had gone ahead a little faster than my fellows, but even then seemed to advance at a snail's pace to petty conquests, for if at the end of years I attained to Hanks's place, I was beginning to doubt that it was worth the pains which I was taking to win it. I did not tell her of the ambitions which had led me into my profession, nor how all my fine ideas had been early dissipated and I had settled down to a struggle for mere existence. On one essential fact, too, was I silent. It arose to my mind as I told my brief story and it spread like a cloud darkening this brightest of my days. You know what the shadow was. By her absence, by her remoteness, Gladys Todd had for me a shadow's unreality. At this moment the tie between us was so attenuated that it was hard for me to believe that it existed at all. I knew that it did exist, but I could not surrender myself to be bound by so frail a thread. I was silent. Childlike, I wished the clouds away. Royally, I commanded the sea to stand back. "And you--what have you been doing all these years?" I asked, turning suddenly to Penelope. "Just growing up," she answered, laughing. "It's very easy to grow up when one has such a kind uncle as mine. You remember the poverty in which he found me. I was a mere charity child, and he took me----" "To his lively, pushing town," said I. "Yes," Penelope went on, "to a big stone house with a green lawn about it dotted with queer figures in iron and marble. They were the most beautiful things I had ever seen--those statues. Now they are all stored in the stable, for we grew up, uncle and I, even in matters of art. But it was like heaven to me then, after the mountains and the smoky cabin, after the clearing and the weeds----" "After our farm," I broke in with a touch of irony, "and to ride behind the fast trotters compared with our farm wagon----" "David," returned Penelope in a voice of reproach, "I have never forgotten the mountains, or the cabin, or the farm. In the first days away from them I was terribly homesick for them all. My uncle suffered for it. His patience and his kindness were unfailing, and he softened me at last. There is nothing in the world that I have wanted that he has not given me."