Peter was to learn, however, that this sonnet was but a solitary flake in a poetic fall of more or less magnitude. He rather conspicuously avoided a reference to her poetry when they met again. To him it was the very least of her gifts. Her hair, that had the tender yellow of ripening corn, was worthy a cycle of sonnets, but pray leave the making of them to some one else! By daylight the jade-colored eyes seemed to shut out the world. The pupils shrank to pin-points. The green looked deep—as many fathoms as the sea. She was all Diana by daylight, a huntress, if you will, of the elusive epithet, but essentially a maiden goddess, who would add no sprightly romance to the chronicles of Olympus. By lamp-light she suggested quite another divinity. The pin-points expanded; they burned black, like coals newly breaking into flame. When Hamilton knew her better, he did not like to think that he had thought her eighteen at their first meeting. It impugned his judgment as a man of the world. Young ladies of eighteen could not possibly be contributors of several years’ standing to the various magazines. Disconcerting scraps of gossip floated to him. He heard of her as bridesmaid at a famous wedding of six years back, when she had deflected the admiration from the bride and remained the central figure of the picture. Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the Salon when he had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin grammar. An unusual situation was abhorrent to him. That he should marry an older woman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a field to which he had not gained admission, was doubly distasteful by reason of his deference to the conventional. If she had flirted with him, his midsummer madness would have evaporated into thin air; but she kept him at arm’s-length, ostensibly took him seriously, and the boy proposed. Her rejection of him was a matter of such consummate skill that Hamilton did not realize the keenness of his disappointment till he was swinging westward over the prairies. She had confided to him that her work claimed her and that she must renounce those sweet responsibilities that made the happiness of other women. It was with the protective mien of one who sought to shield him from an adverse destiny that she declined his suit.