A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of a crowd, into restricted intimacy.  He was feeling the intoxication of her inscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, across the limited breadth of a table-cloth.  He forgot about the unspoken conditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of the barrier for an impetuous leap across.

“I wrote you stacks of letters,” he said, “and you never sent me one little line; not even ‘Yours received and contents noted!’”

In a flash all intimacy vanished.  She might have been at the other end of the dining-room in somebody else’s party nodding to him as to an acquaintance.  Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift an arrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring.

“A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write to the author!”

He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measured commonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony.  Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasure of it?  Famished for her companionship, a foolhardy impulse of temptation had risked its loss.  The waiter set something before them and softly withdrew.  Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplined soldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled a trifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise of better conduct.

They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking of the Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of people passing in the street.  For they had never wanted for words when talking across the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when he threatened an invasion.

While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might have little to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversite meeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget of news.  How high were Jack’s hedges?  How were the Doge’s date-trees?  How was this and that person coming on?  Listening to all the details, Jack felt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one of the swiftly-passing moments.  By no reference and by no inference had she suggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearing from her again.  A thread of old relations had been spun only to be snapped.  She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the sunshine of the Avenue, into which she would dissolve.

“I was to meet father at a bookstore at three,” she said, finally, as she rose.

“Inevitably he would be there or in a gallery,” said Jack.

“He has done the galleries.  This is the day for buying books—­still more books!  I suppose he is spending the orange crop again.  If you keep on spending the same orange crop, just where do you arrive in the maze of finance?”