“Oh, I love you, Peter, for feeling that way,” I exclaimed, heartily, as I grasped his arm with enthusiasm.  “You are so wonderful, Peter.”

“Dear, dearest Betty,” said Peter, as he put his arm through mine, and we both began to swing back and forth on the gate.  “It is so marvelous to have a woman respond to your every mood as you do to mine.  It is like having in one’s possession an angel incarnate in her own harp.”

“Oh, Peter you are wonderful!” I again exclaimed, because I felt that way and had no other feeling to draw another remark from.  It is so satisfactory to love a man with no variations.  I cannot see why girls like to tremble and blush and chill and glow and get angry and repentant about the men they love, as Edith does about Clyde Tolbot.  I wish I could make them all understand the great calmness of true love like mine for Peter.

The five days that Peter stayed with mother, Hayesboro did many other things to him.  The mayor got up a barbecue in his honor, and they had nine political speeches and two roast pigs and a lamb.  Peter came home pale, but we decided before we went to bed to let the hero of “The Emergence” get beaten up a little in the strike before he made his great speech to the capitalist.  I felt so happy for the play.

But the next day Peter took tea alone with Miss Editha Morris Carruthers, and he was so charmed with her that he almost decided to let the whole play end in separation.

“But it is so lonely for a woman to be a heroine of a separation, Peter,” I pleaded with him as we sauntered up and down the long porch.

“Under such stress souls grow, Betty,” he answered, gloomily.  “Together lovers feed on the material; apart, on the immaterial.  Can we say which is best for the final emergence of the superman and—­” Just here Julia came across the street and into our front gate, looking like a ripe peach, in a pink muslin gown, with a huge plate of hickory-nut butter-candy in her hand, and we all three proceeded to material nourishment.  I left them for a few minutes while I went up to my room and took out Grandmother Nelson’s book.  I wanted to be sure that not a single thing would bloom before I got back to The Briers.  Peter had insisted that he should not go forth into the wilderness until he could do it dramatically to stay, so I hadn’t been out for five days or more and I was wild—­simply mad.  To have a garden and be separated from it at sprouting and blooming time is worse than any soul separation that ever happened to any woman.  Of that I feel sure.

Sue Bankhead was as nice and lovely to Peter as could be, and even Billy Robertson’s contentment with himself was slightly ruffled with the way she took him out horseback with her every morning, but her crowning attention was a dance for him.  Sue has the loveliest dances in Hayesboro because of her own charm and the fact that the double parlors in the old Bankhead house are sixty-two feet long and forty-six feet wide.