“He’s a rich man,’Gene,” said Irene, smiling. “Don’t forget that.”
“Go on, then! Go on!” he cried furiously. “Yes—go ahead. Marry him. It’s the right thing for you. Sell yourself. He’s an old man!” he said melodramatically. Randolph Gudger was almost forty— five.
But they danced there slowly in a gray light of dusk that was like pain and beauty; like the lost light undersea, in which his life, a lost merman, swam, remembering exile. And as they danced she, whom he dared not touch, yielded her body unto him, whispering softly to his ear, pressing with slender fingers his hot hand. And she, whom he would not touch, lay there, like a sheaf of grain, in the crook of his arm, token of the world’s remedy—the refuge from the one lost face out of all the faces, the anodyne against the wound named Laura—a thousand flitting shapes of beauty to bring him comfort and delight. The great pageantry of pain and pride and death hung through the dusk its awful vision, touching his sorrow with a lonely joy. He had lost; but all pilgrimage across the world was loss: a moment of cleaving, a moment of taking away, the thousand phantom shapes that beaconed, and the high impassionate grief of stars.
It was dark. Irene Mallard took him by the hand and led him out on the porch.
“Sit down here a moment,’Gene. I want to talk to you.” Her voice was serious, low-pitched. He sat beside her in the swing, obediently, with the sense of an impending lecture.
“I’ve been watching you these last few days,” said Irene Mallard. “I know what’s been going on.”
“What do you mean?” he said thickly, with thudding pulses.
“You know what I mean,” said Irene Mallard sternly. “Now you’re too fine a boy,’Gene, to waste yourself on that Woman. Any one can see what she is. Mother and I have both talked about it. A woman like that can ruin a young boy like you. You’ve got to stop it.”
“How did you know about it?” he muttered. He was frightened
