along a volume by a modern poet:  the verses, as Nancy read them, moved me,—­they were filled with a new faith to which my being responded, the faith of the forth-farer; not the faith of the anchor, but of the sail.  I repeated some of the lines as indications of a creed to which I had long been trying to convert her, though lacking the expression.  She had let the book fall on the grass.  I remember how she smiled down at me with the wisdom of the ages in her eyes, seeking my hand with a gesture that was almost maternal.

“You and the poets,” she said, “you never grow up.  I suppose that’s the reason why we love you—­and these wonderful visions of freedom you have.  Anyway, it’s nice to dream, to recreate the world as one would like to have it.”

“But that’s what you and I are doing,” I insisted.

“We think we’re doing it—­or rather you think so,” she replied.  “And sometimes, I admit that you almost persuade me to think so.  Never quite.  What disturbs me,” she continued, “is to find you and the poets founding your new freedom on new justifications, discarding the old law only to make a new one,—­as though we could ever get away from necessities, escape from disagreeable things, except in dreams.  And then, this delusion of believing that we are masters of our own destiny—­” She paused and pressed my fingers.

“There you go-back to predestination!” I exclaimed.

“I don’t go back to anything, or forward to anything,” she exclaimed.  “Women are elemental, but I don’t expect you to understand it.  Laws and codes are foreign to us, philosophies and dreams may dazzle us for the moment, but what we feel underneath and what we yield to are the primal forces, the great necessities; when we refuse joys it’s because we know these forces by a sort of instinct, when we’re overcome it’s with a full knowledge that there’s a price.  You’ve talked a great deal, Hugh, about carving out our future.  I listened to you, but I resisted you.  It wasn’t the morality that was taught me as a child that made me resist, it was something deeper than that, more fundamental, something I feel but can’t yet perceive, and yet shall perceive some day.  It isn’t that I’m clinging to the hard and fast rules because I fail to see any others, it isn’t that I believe that all people should stick together whether they are happily married or not, but—­I must say it even now—­I have a feeling I can’t define that divorce isn’t for us.  I’m not talking about right and wrong in the ordinary sense—­it’s just what I feel.  I’ve ceased to think.”

“Nancy!” I reproached her.

“I can’t help it—­I don’t want to be morbid.  Do you remember my asking you about God?—­the first day this began? and whether you had a god?  Well, that’s the trouble with us all to-day, we haven’t any God, we’re wanderers, drifters.  And now it’s just life that’s got hold of us, my dear, and swept us away together.  That’s our justification—­if we needed one—­it’s been too strong for us.”  She leaned back against the tree and closed her eyes.  “We’re like chips in the torrent of it, Hugh."....