The thing was to get the sense of the fragrance of all things, of earth, plants, peoples, animals, insects, all together in the mind. One could weave a golden mantle to spread over the earth and over people. The strong animal smells, taken with the smell of pine trees and all such heavy odors, would give the mantle strength to wear well. Then upon the basis of that strength one could turn one’s fancy loose. Now was the time for all the minor poets to come running. On the solid basis John Webster’s fancy had built, they could weave all manner of designs, using all the smells their less sturdy nostrils dare receive, the smell of violets growing beside woodland paths, of little fragile mushrooms, of honey dripping from the sacks under the bellies of insects, of the hair of maidens fresh come from the bath. * * * * * After all John Webster, a man of the middle age, was sitting on a bed with his daughter talking of an experience of his youth. In spite of himself he was giving the tale of that experience a curiously perverted twist. No doubt he was lying to his daughter. Had that young man on the hillside, in the long ago, had the many and complicated feelings with which he was now endowing him? Now and then he stopped talking and shook his head while a smile played across his face. “How firmly now things were arranged between himself and his daughter. There was no doubt a miracle had been wrought.” He even fancied she knew he was lying, that he was throwing a certain mantle of romance over the experience of his young manhood, but he fancied she knew also that it was only by lying to the limit he could come at truth. * * * * * Now one was back in fancy on the hillside again. There was an opening among the trees and through this one looked, seeing the whole valley below. There was a large town down the river somewhere, not the town where he and his bride had got off the train, but a much larger one with factories. Some people had come up the river in boats from the town and were preparing to have a picnic in a grove of trees, upstream and across the river from her uncle’s house. There were both men and women in the party and the women had on white dresses. It was charming to watch them moving in and out among the green trees and one of them came down to the river’s edge and, putting one foot in a boat that was drawn up on the bank, and with the other on the bank itself, she leaned over to fill a pitcher with water. There was the woman and her reflection in the water, seen faintly, even from this distance. There was a going together and a coming apart. The two white figures opened and closed like a delicately tinted shell. Young Webster on the hill had not looked at his bride and they were both silent, but he was becoming almost insanely excited. Was she thinking the thoughts he was thinking? Had her nature also opened itself, as had his?