importance only because Helen liked him. Now they discussed him
impersonally and over her head, as though she were not present,
as a power, an influence, as the leader and exponent of a new
idea. They seemed to think she no longer could pretend to any
peculiar claim upon him, that now he belonged to all of them.

Older men would say to her: "I hear you know Latimer? What sort
of a man is he?"

Helen would not know what to tell them. She could not say he was
a man who sat with his back to a pine-tree, reading from a book
of verse, or halting to devour her with humble, entreating eyes.

She went South for the winter, the doctors deciding she was run
down and needed the change. And with an unhappy laugh at her own
expense she agreed in their diagnosis. She was indifferent as to
where they sent her, for she knew wherever she went she must
still force herself to go on putting one hour on top of another,
until she had built up the inexorable and necessary twenty-four.

When she returned winter was departing, but reluctantly, and
returning unexpectedly to cover the world with snow, to eclipse
the thin spring sunshine with cheerless clouds. Helen took
herself seriously to task. She assured herself it was weak-minded
to rebel. The summer was coming and Fair Harbor with all its old
delights was before her. She compelled herself to take heart, to
accept the fact that, after all, the world is a pretty good
place, and that to think only of the past, to live only on
memories and regrets, was not only cowardly and selfish, but, as
Latimer had already decided, did not tend toward efficiency.