was becoming more engrossing,—­if I may so describe it,—­and spring was approaching.  The stars in their courses were conspiring.  I was by no means as yet a self-acknowledged wooer, and we discussed love in its lighter phases through the medium of literature.  Heaven forgive me for calling it so!  About that period, it will be remembered, a mushroom growth of volumes of a certain kind sprang into existence; little books with “artistic” bindings and wide margins, sweetened essays, some of them written in beautiful English by dilettante authors for drawing-room consumption; and collections of short stories, no doubt chiefly bought by philanderers like myself, who were thus enabled to skate on thin ice over deep water.  It was a most delightful relationship that these helped to support, and I fondly believed I could reach shore again whenever I chose.

There came a Sunday in early May, one of those days when the feminine assumes a large importance.  I had been to the Hutchinses’ church; and Maude, as she sat and prayed decorously in the pew beside me, suddenly increased in attractiveness and desirability.  Her voice was very sweet, and I felt a delicious and languorous thrill which I identified not only with love, but also with a reviving spirituality.  How often the two seem to go hand in hand!

She wore a dress of a filmy material, mauve, with a design in gold thread running through it.  Of late, it seemed, she had had more new dresses:  and their modes seemed more cosmopolitan; at least to the masculine eye.  How delicately her hair grew, in little, shining wisps, around her white neck!  I could have reached out my hand and touched her.  And it was this desire,—­although by no means overwhelming,—­that startled me.  Did I really want her?  The consideration of this vital question occupied the whole time of the sermon; made me distrait at dinner,—­a large family gathering.  Later I found myself alone with heron a bench in the Hutchinses’ garden where we had walked the day of my arrival, during the campaign.

The gardens were very different, now.  The trees had burst forth again into leaf, the spiraea bushes seemed weighted down with snow, and with a note like that of the quivering bass string of a ’cello the bees hummed among the fruit blossoms.  And there beside me in her filmy dress was Maude, a part of it all—­the meaning of all that set my being clamouring.  She was like some ripened, delicious flower ready to be picked....  One of those pernicious, make-believe volumes had fallen on the bench between us, for I could not read any more; I could not think; I touched her hand, and when she drew it gently away I glanced at her.  Reason made a valiant but hopeless effort to assert itself.  Was I sure that I wanted her—­for life?  No use!  I wanted her now, no matter what price that future might demand.  An awkward silence fell between us—­awkward to me, at least—­and I, her guide and mentor, became banal, apologetic, confused.  I made some idiotic remark about being together in the Garden of Eden.