She came and stood, beside him, close to me.

“Alf,” said he, “I have a vast opinion of you, but there are some things I imagine you do not comprehend.  You should have blended your life with that of some such creature as this, and you would have developed a new faculty.  Now I close my eyes.  Ask me anything about her—­I don’t mean about her dress, but about her head or hands, all you can see of the real woman.”

I accepted the challenge, and there was great sport, and a little-great result.  I made the inquest a most searching and minute affair.  I asked him to tell me if there were any mark upon the neck, near one ear, and he described the precise locality and outline of a tiny brown fleck, no larger than a pin’s head.  He told of any little dimple, of any sweep of the downward growth of the brown hair, of any trifling scar from childhood.  And of her chin and neck he told the very markings, in a way that was something wonderful.  His eyes were closed, and his face was turned away from us, but this made no difference.  He described to me even the character of the wonderful network in the palms of her little hands.  Then he opened his eyes and turned to me, chaffingly: 

“You see how ignorant is a man of your sort.  Having no world worth speaking of, he knows nothing of geography.”

I do not believe that even Jean herself knew, before, of how even the physical being of her had been impressed upon the heart and brain of this man.  She listened curiously and wonderingly when, he was talking with his eyes closed, and when he opened them and began his nonsense with me she stood looking at him silently, then suddenly left the room.  It was a way of Jean’s to flee to her own room for a little season when something touched her, and I imagine this was one of the occasions.  She had known for long years how two souls could become knitted and interwoven into one, but I do not believe that before this incident she had ever comprehended how her physical self, as well, had become an ever present picture upon the mind’s retina of her lover and her husband.

I am worried, and bothered.  I am a man past middle age.  I shall never marry now, and shall but drift into a time of doing some little, I hope, toward making things easier for some other men and some women, and then—­into a crematory.  I have a fancy that my body, this machine of flesh and muscle in which I live, should not be boxed and buried in seeping earth to become a foul thing.  That was an idea I learned from this firm friend of mine.  I want it burned, and all of it, save the little urn full of white ashes which some one may care for, to go out and mingle with the pure air, and there to be one of earth’s good things, and to be breathed in again and make part of the life of the maple leaf, or the young girl going to school in the morning, or the old-fashioned pinks in the front yard of the old-fashioned people, or the red roses in the florist’s hot-houses.  I have that fancy.