It contained a woman, of course--a girl, very young, the very spirit of spring, whose laugh would turn my heart and who, like an elusive wood nymph, would lead me panting and hungry through a maze of trees.

I called it the Great Emotion and from that night on I tried to find the original of that boyish picture, looking everywhere with no success.

At twenty-nine, coming out of what seemed to be the glamor of the impossible, I married you to oblige my mother,--you asked for this,--and imagined that I had settled into a conventional rut.

Do you want me to go on with it ?" "Please, Gilbert," said Alice.
He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, "Well, if you enjoy the Christian martyr business it's entirely your lookout." But he dropped his characteristic habit of phrase making and became more jerky and real.

"I respected you, Alice," he went on.