With more than usual satisfaction I drank my coffee, holding the cup with my hands around it like a child ... warming my fingers, which are nearly always cold in the morning....

Then, while Ruth sat opposite me, eyeing me curiously, I began to sing, half-aloud, to myself.

A silence fell.  We exchanged very few words.

And it was our custom, when together, Ruth and I, to hold long discussions concerning the methods and technique of the English poets, especially the earlier ones.

This morning Baxter’s secretary rose and left part of her breakfast uneaten, hurrying into the house as if to avoid something which she had seen and dreaded.

* * * * *

I ate a long time, dreaming.

Darrie came out, followed immediately by Daniel.  Daniel was in an obstreperous mood ... he cried out that I must be his “telegraph pole,” that he would be a lineman, and climb me.  I felt an affection for him that I had not known before.  I played with him, letting him climb up my leg.

He finished, a-straddle my shoulders.  I reached up and sat him still higher, on my head.  And he waved his arms and shouted, as if making signals to someone far off.

Darrie laughed.

“Which would you rather have, a son or a daughter?” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” I replied, letting Daniel slide down, “but I think I’d rather have a daughter ... the next generation will see a great age of freedom for women ... feminism....

“Then it would be a grand thing, too, to have a beautiful daughter to go about with ... and I would be old and silver-haired and benignant-looking ... and people would say, as they saw the two of us: 

“’There goes the poet, John Gregory, and his daughter ... isn’t she a beautiful girl!’

“And she would be a great actress.”

* * * * *

Penton came forth from the big house ... he poised tentatively like a queer bird on the verge of a long flight ... then he wavered rapidly down the steps.

“—­slept late!... has the mail come yet?... where’s Ruth?”

“Isn’t she in the house?” I queried.

“I saw her stepping out at the back door a minute ago” ... said Darrie.

“We had breakfast together ...  I....”

“I hope she doesn’t stay away long ...  I have an article on Blue Laws as a Reactionary Weapon, that I want to dictate for a magazine ...—­one of her moods, I suppose!”

I looked the little, large-browed man over almost impersonally.  I saw him as from far away.  He came out very clear to me.

I found a profound pity for him waking in my heart, together with a sort of contempt.

“And where’s Hildreth?”

“Not up yet I presume,” replied Darrie.

* * * * *

I excused myself and hurried back to my tent ... where, instead of settling down to work on the third act of my play, I lay prone on my cot, day-dreaming of the future.  How beautiful it would be, now that I had at last found my life-mate!