his shoul- der. Dreams, dreams, and all in the spinning of the
wheel, and the rich shadows of the old broken courtyard where he
sat. And the wheel stopped and the thread broke, and the little
new shapes he had made stood all about him, and he was only a
potter in Peshawar."

Her voice was like a song. She had utterly forgotten my
existence. I did not dislike it at the moment, for I wanted to
hear more, and the impersonal is the rarest gift a woman can give
a man.

"Did you buy anything?"

"He gave me a gift - a flawed jar of turquoise blue, faint
turquoise green round the lip. He saw I understood. And then I
bought a little gold cap and a wooden box of jade-green Kabul
grapes. About a rupee, all told. But it was Eastern merchandise,
and I was trading from Balsora and Baghdad, and Eleazar's camels
were swaying down from Damascus along the Khyber Pass, and coming
in at the great Darwazah, and friends' eyes met me everywhere. I
am profoundly happy here."

The sinking sun lit an almost ecstatic face.

I envied her more deeply than I had ever envied any one. She had
the secret of immortal youth, and I felt old as I looked at her.
One might be eighty and share that passionate impersonal joy. Age
could not wither nor custom stale the infinite variety of her
world's joys. She had a child's dewy youth in her eyes.