Jewel Weed

"Good night," said Dick. "I suppose I must not keep you. To think I have

the unbelievable good fortune to kiss you good night, sweetheart."

Mrs. Quincy turned over in the lumpy bed which she and her daughter

shared and said, with a querulousness undiminished by her sleepiness,

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Lena Quincy, gallivanting around

at this hour of night. It ain't decent. But there!"

"I guess I know my business," Lena snapped.

She turned out the gas to undress in the dark rather than encourage her

mother's conversation. She needed to think. An awful problem had just

presented itself. How was she to get a trousseau?

It was in another mood that Dick Percival walked home. Whenever anything

very great and wonderful happens to us, we are apt to bow our heads and

cry, "What am I, that this should be given to me?" Doubtless he is the

noblest man who most often feels this exultant humility. This was Dick's

hour on the mountain. The depth of his own tenderness, the deliciousness

of his passion swept over him like a revelation, as he asked himself in

wonder how it could be that this love had sprung up at once, like

Aphrodite from the waves, where no one could have suspected such a

marvel. He himself had been without realization of how his passing

interest had deepened its roots until now they fed on every part of him.

Love had startled him like a stroke of lightning out of a clear sky, but

it was evident that it was no light that flashed out and then

disappeared. It had come to stay.

Then came self-reproach. He remembered with hot cheeks that he had

actually joked with Ellery about her in early days, and let himself be

bantered in return--cad that he was, incapable of appreciating at first

sight the woman he was to love. He had thought her an exquisite trifle,

almost too illusive to be taken seriously. Now that very illusiveness

was the thing that gripped him closest, like poetry and music and all

the finer elements of life, the most impossible to explain, the most

supreme in their dominion. Beauty meant all this. He found himself

repeating, "Beauty is truth. Truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth,

and all ye need to know." And Lena was beautiful. How beautiful! He

trembled in flesh and spirit at the vision of her face turned up to him

out of the black November darkness, at the memory of the fine texture of

her cheeks and lips.

He did not stop to ask himself whether he and Keats were agreed in their

definition of beauty. Moreover, poor Keats never had the delight of

anything so pink and golden and blue-eyed as Lena Quincy.