of life and laughter, that she had become one of the certainties in a fleeting and tumultuous world. We were stupidly used to her, as you are used to sunrise or a star. Then without warning the news came, and the word went from lip to hushed lip: “Lou Guiney is dead.” That was the name, Lou Guiney, as it had been in the day of her youth. And at once we became poignantly alive to her with a more sensitive appreciation, a new awareness. We turned renewedly to her work and found in it a more quickly breathing presence. We had been recalled, in a shock of haste, to crown it before our own hands should be too lax to lift the heaviness of laurel. So it was that she seemed to have stepped at once into that porch of continued being which is the house of an immortality of love and praise, the only thing the world has really to offer the spirits of its dead. To recall the form and color of her youth is the eager task likely to give her oldest friends their first imperfect solace. For it is the pathetic human instinct to catch at the mantle of time past, as if to assure itself of something in the web of life that holds. Those who knew her at twenty and thirty need not err widely in their guess at her at fifteen. For being one of that gay fellowship for whom “a star danced” and who buoyantly refuse infection from the “hungry generations” that “tread” us “down,” she stayed, in every sense, except that of the disciplined mind and an acquired patience of the heart, unaffectedly young. Age, the age of mere years, brutal to attack and vanquish, could never, even in his ultimate assaults, if they had been permitted him, have withered her bright fecundities of speech and glance. For there is something in a certain quality of youth that will not be downed. It is the livingness of a mind refreshed at wells of immortalities. Of outward vain pretense—the affectation of a persisting juvenility—it is divinely innocent. You could hardly imagine her, at any age, without her girl’s grace, her mystic smile. A long-legged romp in petticoats far beyond the milestones when childhood is apt to slink away abashed before oncoming desires and dignities, she was early in love with the sweet seclusion of books and equally with gay adventure out of doors. The fields, on a day of spring, the river under skies dull or bright, were her abiding joys. Her “winding Charles” was the young navigator’s track to seas of pleasure. She “could not have enough of this sweet world.”