“She is just the wife for you, Hugh,” my mother confided to me.  “If I had chosen her myself I could not have done better,” she added, with a smile.

I was inclined to believe it, but Maude would have none of this illusion.

“He just stumbled across me,” she insisted....

We went on long sails together, towards Wood’s Hole and the open sea, the sprays washing over us.  Her cheeks grew tanned....  Sometimes, when I praised her and spoke confidently of our future, she wore a troubled expression.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked her once.

“You mustn’t put me on a pedestal,” she said gently.  “I want you to see me as I am—­I don’t want you to wake up some day and be disappointed.  I’ll have to learn a lot of things, and you’ll have to teach me.  I can’t get used to the fact that you, who are so practical and successful in business, should be such a dreamer where I am concerned.”

I laughed, and told her, comfortably, that she was talking nonsense.

“What did you think of me, when you first knew me?” I inquired.

“Well,” she answered, with the courage that characterized her, “I thought you were rather calculating, that you put too high a price on success.  Of course you attracted me.  I own it.”

“You hid your opinions rather well,” I retorted, somewhat discomfited.

She flushed.

“Have you changed them?” I demanded.

“I think you have that side, and I think it a weak side, Hugh.  It’s hard to tell you this, but it’s better to say so now, since you ask me.  I do think you set too high a value on success.’

“Well, now that I know what success really is, perhaps I shall reform,” I told her.

“I don’t like to think that you fool yourself,” she replied, with a perspicacity I should have found extraordinary.

Throughout my life there have been days and incidents, some trivial, some important, that linger in my memory because they are saturated with “atmosphere.”  I recall, for instance, a gala occasion in youth when my mother gave one of her luncheon parties; on my return from school, the house and its surroundings wore a mysterious, exciting and unfamiliar look, somehow changed by the simple fact that guests sat decorously chatting in a dining-room shining with my mother’s best linen and treasured family silver and china.  The atmosphere of my wedding-day is no less vivid.  The house of Ezra Hutchins was scarcely recognizable:  its doors and windows were opened wide, and all the morning people were being escorted upstairs to an all-significant room that contained a collection like a jeweller’s exhibit,—­a bewildering display.  There was a massive punch-bowl from which dangled the card of Mr. and Mrs. Adolf Scherer, a really wonderful tea set of old English silver given by Senator and Mrs. Watling, and Nancy Willett, with her certainty of good taste, had sent an old English tankard of the time of the second Charles.  The secret was in that room.  And it magically transformed for me (as I stood, momentarily alone, in the doorway where I had first beheld Maude) the accustomed scene, and charged with undivined significance the blue shadows under the heavy foliage of the maples.  The September sunlight was heavy, tinged with gold....