Two intimacies entered into the life of Professor Hardage. The first of these had been formed many years before with Judge Ravenel Morris. They had discovered each other by drifting as lonely men do in the world; each being without family ties, each loving literature, each having empty hours. The bond between them had strengthened, until it had become to each a bond of strength indeed, mighty and uplifting. The other intimacy was one of those for which human speech will never, perhaps, be called upon to body forth its describing word. In the psychology of feeling there are states which we gladly choose to leave unlanguaged. Vast and deep-sounding as is the orchestra of words, there are scores which we never fling upon such instruments--realities that lie outside the possibility and the desirability of utterance as there are rays of the sun that fall outside the visible spectrum of solar light. What description can be given in words of that bond between two, when the woman stands near the foot of the upward slope of life, and the man is already passing down on the sunset side, with lengthening afternoon shadows on the gray of his temples--between them the cold separating peaks of a generation? Such a generation of toiling years separated Professor Hardage from Isabel Conyers. When, at the age of twenty, she returned after years of absence in an eastern college--it was a tradition of her family that its women should be brilliantly educated--he verged upon fifty. To his youthful desires that interval was nothing; but to his disciplined judgment it was everything. "Even though it could be," he said to himself, "it should not be, and therefore it shall not." His was an idealism that often leaves its holder poor indeed save in the possession of its own incorruptible wealth. No doubt also the life-long study of the ideals of classic time came to his guidance now with their admonitions of exquisite balance, their moderation and essential justness. But after he had given up all hope of her, he did not hesitate to draw her to him in other ways; and there was that which drew her unfathomably to him--all the more securely since in her mind there was no thought that the bond between them would ever involve the possibility of love and marriage. His library became another home to her. One winter she read Greek with him--authors not in her college course. Afterward he read much more Greek to her. Then they laid Greek aside, and he took her through the history of its literature and through that other noble one, its deathless twin.