What was said between them I do not know.  But in some way or other their minds met; for long after Miss Austin and her mother had returned from some call, long after they had all left him, Pinckney continued to pace up and down restlessly in the dark.  Pinckney had never seen a woman like this.  After all, he was very young; and he had, in his heart, supposed that the doubts and delights of his soul were peculiar to men alone.  He thought all women—­at all events, all young and worthy women—­regarded life and its accepted forms as an accomplished fact, not to be questioned, and, indeed, too delightful to need it.  The young South Carolinian, in his ambitions, in his heart-longings and heart-sickenings, in his poetry, even in his emotions, had always been lonely; so that his loneliness had grown to seem to him as merely part of the day’s work.  The best women, he knew, where the best housewives; they were a rest and a benefit for the war-weary man, much as might be a pretty child, a bed of flowers, a strain of music.  With Emily Austin he should find all this; and he loved her as good, pretty, amiable, perfect in her way.  But now, with Miss Warfield—­it had seemed that he was not even lonely.

Pinckney did not see her again for a week.  When he met her, he avoided her; she certainly avoided him.  Breeze, meantime, gave a dinner.  He gave it on his yacht, and gave it to men alone.  Pinckney was of the number.

The next day there was a driving party; it was to drive out of town to Purgatory, a pretty place, where there is a brook in a deep ravine with a verdant meadow-floor; and there they were to take food and drink, as is the way of humanity in pretty places.  Now it so happened that the Austins, Miss Warfield, Breeze, and Pinckney were going to drive in a party, the Austins and Miss Warfield having carriages of their own; but at the last moment Breeze did not appear, and Emily Austin was incapacitated by a headache.  She insisted, as is the way of loving women, that “Charles should not lose it”; for to her it was one of life’s pleasures, and such pleasures satisfied her soul. (It may be that she gave more of her soul to life’s duties than did Charles, and life’s pleasures were thus adequate to the remainder; I do not know.) Probably Miles Breeze also had a headache; at all events, he did not, at the last moment, appear.  It was supposable that he would turn up at the picnic; Mrs. Austin joined her daughter’s entreaty; Miss Warfield was left unattended; in fine, Pinckney went with her.

Miss Warfield had a solid little phaeton with two stout ponies:  she drove herself.  For some time they were silent; then, insensibly, Pinckney began to talk and she to answer.  What they said I need not say —­indeed I could not, for Pinckney was a poet, a man of rare intellect and imagination, and Miss Warfield was a woman of this world and the next; a woman who used conventions as another might use a fan, to’ screen her from fools; whose views were based on the ultimate.  But they talked of the world, and of life in it; and when it came to an end, Pinckney noted to himself this strange thing, that they had both talked as of an intellectual problem, no longer concerning their emotions—­in short, as if this life were at an end, and they were two dead people discussing it.