And all this was far enough away from the question at issue: which was very simple—in fact, it resolved itself down to one thing—doing what Rose-Ann wanted him to do! Not because she was his wife; not at all because he loved her; but because she understood life better than he did.... He must never let her know what a baby he was about things like these. What a silly fuss he had been making about nothing at all! He must do what was expected of him: yes, confound it, and if she wanted a house like the Morgans’, and crowds of people ... he could see with half-dreaming mind her white shoulders, her eyes, her red-gold hair, gleaming in their midst—why, she should have them!... even if he had to “play the host,” like Howard Morgan, for her. ... He fell asleep and awoke dreaming that he was a little boy, who was captured by savages and tortured, and who endured it all with a smile for the sake of their Queen, a girl with white shoulders and red hair, who had promised to tell him a secret if he was brave. And he said: “I know your secret! You are all the women I have ever known; you are the little girl I was afraid to walk to school with, and you are the girl I played with in the garret and was afraid to go to meet for a farewell kiss, and you are Margaret, the girl in the candy-factory that I was afraid to write to, and you are the girl in Port Royal that I was afraid to ask to marry me.” And she said, “Yes, but I have one more secret.” “I know that, too,” he said. “You are Life!” A very literary dream! He wasn’t sure, when he woke up at dawn, but that he had made it up like a story. Anyway, he understood it, and he didn’t want to forget it, and he was writing it down hastily on sheets of hotel stationery when Rose-Ann opened her eyes sleepily at eight o’clock.... She opened her eyes sleepily, but sleep vanished when she saw what he was doing, and she sat up eagerly in bed. “Oh!” she cried, looking as though an expected, long-awaited miracle had happened at last. “What?” he asked, startled. “You’re writing again!—writing, I mean, for yourself....” “Well, what of it?” he said crossly. “Nothing,” she said. “Only—I knew you would!” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XXIII. A Bargain in Utopias 1