“We’ll ride uptown in the L, to celebrate,” he pleaded. “There’s a bit where it turns right into the sunset for a few blocks; if you stand on the front platform it’s corking. And I know a place where we can get a bottle of _asti spumante_....” The lighted candles of the Italian basement where they dined. At first his shyness had come back upon him: he seemed to feel that taking any one but Phyllis out to dinner was an incredible truancy. Then, as they looked anxiously at each other, some element in the blood broke free. His mind came running to her like a child, like a boy lost in a world of tall stone buildings and clamouring typewriters. His poor shivered ideas just fitted into the fractured edges of her own. He had been well drilled, but there was in him a little platoon that had broken away from the draft and enlisted in the Foreign Legion. “You know,” he said, “I never talked like this to any one before. What is there about you that makes one say what he really thinks? My mind feels as though someone had stolen its clothes while it was in bathing. How will it be able to go back to work to-morrow?” Warm golden candlelight and cold golden wine: the little table in the corner was a yellow island in a sea of cigarette smoke, a sunny silence in the comforting hum of other people’s chatter. In her own loneliness she saw his mind like the naked footprint on Crusoe’s beach. There must have been another footprint there too: the footprint of a mischievous godling who runs the beaches of the world as naked as Man Friday. “The ideas I folded neatly and hid under a stone” (she could still hear him saying it, there was something delightfully heavy in his way of saying _stone_), “the ideas I thought you have to leave behind when you go bathing in the river of life, I think maybe I shall go back and look under that stone for them and see if they aren’t the most important of all. I thought they were just clothes. Maybe they were my bathing suit.” The figure of speech wasn’t quite limpid. There was perhaps a little _asti spumante_ in it, and a few gassy bubbles of exaggeration. But she understood what he meant. Ten, eleven years older than she, how young he seemed. He paused a while, getting younger every moment. He waved away a drift of smoke. “You must meet Phyllis,” he said. Then he had found, later, that it wasn’t necessary, for she had known Phyllis as a child. How small the world is, he said sadly. “Phyllis and I were small, too,” she replied. She wondered if there were four Phyllises also? * * * * *