A very ordinary American girl, of the old Anglo-Saxon stock—but tempered and refined by struggle: child of very ordinary American parents, educated rather to beauty of thought than to “beauty roses.” But, in the mind of Francis Gordon, she stood for all the flowers; for poetry and romance, for self-sacrifice and achievement, for every decent impulse which had helped him through the black hours of crisis. He had not married her, not even asked her to marry him. He had not—in that brief fortnight of a shipboard friendship—deemed himself worthy. It had seemed to him as though God—a visible speaking God—forbade their union; commanding His creature, Francis Gordon, abandon that dream; take up, in its stead, the burden of vocation, the Work of writing for which He had endowed him with a tiny spark of His own genius. And so Francis—who imagined himself to have seen, for a moment, behind that Veil of God which does not lift until the time appointed—returned to London; sold his house in Curzon Street, his cars and his pictures, his gold plate and his Aubusson carpets; and retired, taking with him only Prout, his old manservant, to this high apartment at the top of the eighteenth-century Georgian building in Mecklenburgh Square. All “literary” London knew _a_ Francis Gordon, a versifier whose technique they admired, whose pose they applauded. But _the_ Francis, they did not know. Nor, had they known him, would they have, at that time, admired. For _the_ Francis—the man who, for all his fine aspirations, was still utterly incapable of formulating clean thought into simple words—had conceived another dream. And this was the shape of it. He had learned from Beatrice, and from her parents, something—though very little—of the real America. He had taught her something—though very little—of the real England. He realized, as few Englishmen of his time, how the two nations had drifted apart; misunderstood one another. And it seemed to him, in his presumption, that a few words, a trumpery poem, could set this misunderstanding right.