“Chilly night, but I like this melancholy gray,” he said.

“Yes.”

They passed a moaning clump of trees and splashed along the wet road.  He tucked her hand into the side-pocket of his overcoat.  She caught his thumb and, sighing, held it exactly as Hugh held hers when they went walking.  She thought about Hugh.  The current maid was in for the evening, but was it safe to leave the baby with her?  The thought was distant and elusive.

Erik began to talk, slowly, revealingly.  He made for her a picture of his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis:  the steam and heat, and the drudgery; the men in darned vests and crumpled trousers, men who “rushed growlers of beer” and were cynical about women, who laughed at him and played jokes on him.  “But I didn’t mind, because I could keep away from them outside.  I used to go to the Art Institute and the Walker Gallery, and tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike out to the Gates house and imagine it was a chateau in Italy and I lived in it.  I was a marquis and collected tapestries—­that was after I was wounded in Padua.  The only really bad time was when a tailor named Finkelfarb found a diary I was trying to keep and he read it aloud in the shop—­it was a bad fight.”  He laughed.  “I got fined five dollars.  But that’s all gone now.  Seems as though you stand between me and the gas stoves—­the long flames with mauve edges, licking up around the irons and making that sneering sound all day—­aaaaah!”

Her fingers tightened about his thumb as she perceived the hot low room, the pounding of pressing-irons, the reek of scorched cloth, and Erik among giggling gnomes.  His fingertip crept through the opening of her glove and smoothed her palm.  She snatched her hand away, stripped off her glove, tucked her hand back into his.

He was saying something about a “wonderful person.”  In her tranquillity she let the words blow by and heeded only the beating wings of his voice.

She was conscious that he was fumbling for impressive speech.

“Say, uh—­Carol, I’ve written a poem about you.”

“That’s nice.  Let’s hear it.”

“Damn it, don’t be so casual about it!  Can’t you take me seriously?”

“My dear boy, if I took you seriously——!  I don’t want us to be hurt more than—­more than we will be.  Tell me the poem.  I’ve never had a poem written about me!”

“It isn’t really a poem.  It’s just some words that I love because it seems to me they catch what you are.  Of course probably they won’t seem so to anybody else, but——­Well——­

     Little and tender and merry and wise
     With eyes that meet my eyes.

Do you get the idea the way I do?”

“Yes!  I’m terribly grateful!” And she was grateful—­while she impersonally noted how bad a verse it was.

She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night.  Monstrous tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; puddles and rocks glistened with inner light.  They were passing a grove of scrub poplars, feeble by day but looming now like a menacing wall.  She stopped.  They heard the branches dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the soggy earth.