And there were these other matters in both our lives.
As to most of them we did not hold speech together.

Our intimacy as yet lay quite within a circle so charmed that it might not be entered by things too personal to either of us.

By a kind of tacit treaty we brought thither none but those affairs which invited a not too serious tone.

Our late common life had provided an abundance of these, and they had been hailed by my friend with an unfailing levity which the widow of J.Rodney Potts, for one, would have found it impossible to condone.

"I am a light old woman," she had said to me; "I laugh at the world even when I fear it most." There was a desperate sprite of banter in her eye when she made this confession, a sprite that leaped forth to be gay when I shrived her.