"Mother and I went to Cook's to get the tickets. When we went into the office I saw a Yank--oh, so nicely dressed! Lovely patent-leather boots. And I thought, 'Oh, dear, he'll never look at me.' But presently he did, and took out his card-case and folded up a card and put it on the ledge behind him, and gave me a look and moved away. So I walked over and took it up. Mamma never saw, but the clerks did." * * * * * I have reported Mildred's story truthfully at a particular moment of her life. Those who travel meet people now and again whose individuality is so strong that it survives. Mildred's has survived many years, and I have written this account of it because it seems to me to throw a gleam into the mystery of life without, however, doing anything to destroy the mystery. CHAPTER X A REMEMBRANCE It was in the vastness of Westminster Hall that I saw her for the first time--saw her pointed face, her red hair, her brilliant teeth. The next time was in her own home--a farm-house that had been rebuilt and was half a villa. At the back were wheat-stacks, a noisy thrashing-machine, a pigeon-cote, and stables whence, with jangle of harness and cries of yokels, the great farm-horses always seemed to be coming from or going to their work on the downs. In a garden planted with variegated firs she tended her flowers all day; and in the parlour, where we assembled in the evening, her husband smoked his pipe in silence; the young ladies, their blonde hair hanging down their backs, played waltzes; she alone talked. Her conversation was effusive, her laughter abundant and bright. I had only just turned eighteen, and was deeply interested in religious problems, and one day I told her the book I carried in my pocket, and sometimes pretended to study, was Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." My explanation of the value of the work did not seem to strike her, and her manifest want of interest in the discussion of religious problems surprised me, for she passed for a religious woman, and I failed to understand how mere belief could satisfy any one. One day in the greenhouse, whither I had wandered, she interrupted some allusion to the chapter entitled "The Deduction of the Categories" with a burst of laughter, and declared that she would call me Kant. The nickname was not adopted by the rest of the family--another was invented which appealed more to their imagination--but she held to the name she had given me, and during the course of our long friendship never addressed me by any other.