Her beauty seemed of a sudden to expand, to become greatly exaggerated, not in quality but in dimensions, so that it excluded all else from the sense of space. The sight of it unpoised me. And she knew. I could feel that she knew. My impulse toward her grew stronger and stronger, tending to become irresistible. This she knew also. Yet she lingered. Then I seized and kissed her. At the first touch her whole weight fell in my arms. Her eyes closed, her head dropped backward, face upturned. She trembled violently and sighed as if every string of tension in her being snapped. How little we can save of those enormous moments in which the old, old body mind remembers all that ever happened! What was it that one knew so vividly in that co-extensive, panoramic, timeless interval, and cannot now recall? The first kiss goes a journey. The second stays on earth. The first one is a meeting in the void. Then this world again. “Vera! Vera!” I whispered. Her eyes opened.... The look they gave me was so unexpected, so unnatural in the circumstances, that I had a start of terror lest she had gone out of herself. Then I recognized it. This was she whom I had forgotten. These were those impervious, scornful carnelian eyes you could not see into. The old hot and cold feeling came over me again. And though she still lay in my arms, not having moved at all, it was now as if I were not touching her, as if I never had. I released her. Without a word she turned and walked slowly up the stairway out of sight. The next whole day was one of utter, lonely wretchedness, supported only by a feeling of resentment. I found myself humming “Coming Through the Rye,” and wondering why, as it was a ditty I had not remembered for years. Then it came to me why,--“If a body kiss a body need a body cry?” What had I done that was so terrible after all? I went to the Galts’ for dinner uninvited, as now I often did. Vera did not appear. She was reported to be indisposed. I passed the evening with Galt in his study, and left early. Natalie was alone in the parlor, reading. She came into the hall as I was putting on my coat and laid a hand on my arm, consolingly. “You won’t stop coming, will you?” she asked. “What do you mean?” “They always do,” she said. “And some of them are so nice, like you.” “Natalie, what are you talking about?” “Father would miss you terribly,” she said. I promised whatever it was she wanted. She shook hands on it and watched me down the steps. The next evening I called after dinner. Vera was out. I wrote her a note of expostulation, then one in anger, and a third in terms that were abject; and she answered none of them. iii