The fact that Rufe Melton was entirely cut off from the play of her real powers; that he thought her ridiculous, and said so, when she gave any notice of holding other than the standard American points of view on politics and religion and social ethics; this was not so serious a breach between them, as it would have been to a woman who had not come into so startling a reaction as Pidge had, against the whole system of knowing and not doing. All the knowledge that really mattered to Pidge was that working doctrine which doesn’t announce or explain, but shows itself in living the life. She was very sad, and continually sad, that she had to work upon Rufe the iron of irony, the stab so subtle that it astonishes before it hurts, and the self-control which disarms. Sometimes Sundays or in unexpected periods of leisure they had moments of actual delight together. This occasionally happened when food just pleased him, or when an acceptance from a magazine arrived at a price which he considered adequate. (Rufus never neglected the price of his things, as an indication of his getting on.) He uncovered a real levity at such times, and their talk didn’t walk merely, then; it danced. “We’ll go up to Harlem,” he said one Sunday morning. “I used to live up there in the colored settlement----” Figuratively speaking, Pidge waved her hand before her own eyes to shut out the critical negatives which always arose when Rufe told of living somewhere. They went and stayed gay. When he turned from her innocently to consult a policeman in Harlem, she checked the first and last, “I told you so.” They found yams that day--yams freshly arrived from Georgia, and coffee said to be parched and dripped according to an ideal of New Orleans first families. These satisfied Rufus, and still they stayed gay. Even his, “I could take you around to a lot of queer dumps in this man’s town,” didn’t upset anything. Altogether that day was memorable.... Once in desperate fatigue, when there were moving dark spots before her eyes in every ray of daylight, Pidge cried to Miss Claes: “But he is lost to everything, entirely oblivious to everything but himself and his work--his stories, his fame, his winning his way!” “I know, Pidge, but the world is on top of him yet. He is fighting his way up and out. Romance can’t be entirely satisfying, you know, when it has ambition for a rival. You’ve told me something about the thrall of a book in yourself--how engrossing it is.” “That all goes out of me when I’m with him,” Pidge said suddenly. “I never thought of it before, but all that old agony to produce another book that I used to feel is gone. I seem to let him carry all that.” “That helps for the present, doesn’t it?”