The time flew.  Her presence was like a bracing, tingling atmosphere in which I felt revived and exhilarated, self-restored.  For Nancy did not question—­she took me as I was.  We looked out on the world, as it were, from the same window, and I could not help thinking that ours, after all, was a large view.  The topics didn’t matter—­our conversation was fragrant with intimacy; and we were so close to each other it seemed incredible that we ever should be parted again.  At last the little clock on the mantel chimed an hour, she started and looked up.

“Why, it’s seven, Hugh!” she exclaimed, rising.  “I’d no idea it was so late, and I’m dining with the Dickinsons.  I’ve only just time to dress.”

“It’s been like a reunion, hasn’t it?—­a reunion after many years,” I said.  I held her hand unconsciously—­she seemed to be drawing me to her, I thought she swayed, and a sudden dizziness seized me.  Then she drew away abruptly, with a little cry.  I couldn’t be sure about the cry, whether I heard it or not, a note was struck in the very depths of me.

“Come in again,” she said, “whenever you’re not too busy.”  And a minute later I found myself on the street.

This was the beginning of a new intimacy with Nancy, resembling the old intimacy yet differing from it.  The emotional note of our parting on the occasion I have just related was not again struck, and when I went eagerly to see her again a few days later I was conscious of limitations,—­not too conscious:  the freedom she offered and which I gladly accepted was a large freedom, nor am I quite sure that even I would have wished it larger, though there were naturally moments when I thought so:  when I asked myself what I did wish, I found no answer.  Though I sometimes chafed, it would have been absurd of me to object to a certain timidity or caution I began to perceive in her that had been absent in the old Nancy; but the old Nancy had ceased to exist, and here instead was a highly developed, highly specialized creature in whom I delighted; and after taking thought I would not have robbed her of fine acquired attribute.  As she had truly observed, we were both conventional; conventionality was part of the price we had willingly paid for membership in that rarer world we had both achieved.  It was a world, to be sure, in which we were rapidly learning to take the law into our own hands without seeming to defy it, in order that the fear of it might remain in those less fortunately placed and endowed:  we had begun with the appropriation of the material property of our fellow-citizens, which we took legally; from this point it was, of course, merely a logical step to take—­legally, too other gentlemen’s human property—­their wives, in short:  the more progressive East had set us our example, but as yet we had been chary to follow it.

About this time rebellious voices were beginning to make themselves heard in the literary wilderness proclaiming liberty—­liberty of the sexes.  There were Russian novels and French novels, and pioneer English novels preaching liberty with Nietzschean stridency, or taking it for granted.  I picked these up on Nancy’s table.