He was touched with sentimental self-pity at the thought of leaving all this,--the beauty, the wonder, the joy of Europe! In another short month instead of these golden hours of full sensation there would be Chicago, whose harsh picture a three years' absence had not softened. "I don't know," the girl replied, with a long sigh for remembered joy. "One could not be as happy as this for months and years." "I'd like to try!" he said lightly. "No! Not you!" she retorted with sudden warmth. "What could a man do here?" "There are a lot of fellows in Europe who manage to answer that question somehow. Most of the men I knew in Paris don't expect to go back yet, and not to Chicago anyway." Her lips compressed quickly. Evidently they were not the kind of men she thought well of. "Why!" she stammered, words crowding tempestuously to her tongue. "How could you stay, and not work out your own life, not make your own place in the world like uncle Powers? How it would trouble him to hear you say that!" She made him a trifle ashamed of his desire to keep out of the fight any longer. Hers, he judged, was a militant, ambitious nature, and he was quick to feel what she expected of him. After they had sat there a long time without speaking, she said gently, as if she wished to be just to him:-- "It might be different, if one were an artist; but even then I should think a man would want to carry back what he had received here to the place he was born in,--shouldn't you?" "Well, perhaps," he admitted, "if the place weren't just--Chicago! It wouldn't seem much use to carry this back there. The best thing for a man would be to forget it," he concluded rather bitterly. They never came back to this topic. Nevertheless those simple words which the girl had spoken in that garden of Ravello became a tonic for him at other moments of shrinking or regret. He felt what was in her eyes a man's part. They made the long voyage homewards through the Mediterranean, touching at Gibraltar for a last, faint glimpse of romance. It was a placid journey in a slow steamer, with a small company of dull, middle-aged Americans, and the two young people were left much to themselves. In the isolation of the sunny, windless sea, their acquaintance took on imperceptibly a personal character. After the fashion of the egotistic male, he told her, bit by bit, all that he knew about himself,--his college days, his friends, and his work at the Beaux Arts. From the past,--his past,--they slid to the future that lay before him on the other shore of the Atlantic. He sketched for her in colored words the ideals of his majestic art. Tucked up on deck those long, cloudless nights, they reached the higher themes,--what a man could do, as Richardson and Atwood had shown the glorious way, toward expressing the character and spirit of a fresh race in brick and stone and steel!