Hartley tried to paint before her eyes the panorama of London from Waterloo Bridge, with its imperial sweep and mass of river front huddling from the Houses of Parliament to the Tower. He tried to make her feel the sober, low-hung English sky, the softened lights, and the more ordered and solemn lines of London's architecture, where New York's almost universal newness of things was not to be found, and where the dry, hard tones of the New World's brown-stone fronts were likewise happily absent. She listened intently, and some of her questions were so innocently childlike, and were asked with such a winning ingenuousness that he laughed now and then. It was not until he had finished that she confessed the real cause of her dilemma. "You see, the book I've been working on so long is partly laid in London, and of course I've never been there. And when you haven't even passed through a place on a train it's pretty hard to get the right local color, isn't it?" Hartley assumed that it was. "And I've tried reading it up, but it's no use. I'm afraid I haven't the absorbent mind; some people come out of a book, you see, like a spaniel out of water, scattering a shower of ideas all over you. Well, I can't do that; and what makes it so much harder for me," she added plaintively, "I've known so few nice Englishmen." Hartley was studying Cleopatra's Needle. As some remote mental vision of the Old Serpent of the Nile drifted through his mind he thought how few nice Americans he had met before. "That's where they're so ready to catch me up--the critics, you know," she went on. She looked very pretty and flower-like under her big hat. "You can imagine how hard it is, can't you?" she added. He turned to her with a sudden great purpose in his face. The thought of it warmed and glowed through him like wine. "Why couldn't I help you with it?" he asked eagerly. Her fluttering eyes rested on him warmly, but only for a moment. Then she shook her head plaintively. "That's _too_ much," she murmured. But he asked her again, humbly. Unconsciously her gloved fingers touched his arm; there was a confession of deeper things in the movement. "Would you?" she asked in her soft contralto. Hartley tried to tell her how happy and proud it would make him. He wondered at the note of humility in her voice, at her half-tristful hesitancy. "I should love to think it was you who had helped me in a thing like that," she said gratefully. And he could see by the luminous eyes that it was true, and for the rest of that drive no sunlight had sifted through more golden air, no flowers had ever been so odorous, and no green had ever looked so deep to him.