XI


By the first of June Fashion had deserted the city with its winds
and fogs and dust, and Madeleine was one of the few that remained.
Her husband had intended to send her to Congress Springs in the
mountains of the Santa Clara Valley, but she seemed to be so much
better that he willingly let her stay on, congratulating himself on
the results of his treatment. She was no longer listless and was
always singing at the piano when he rushed in for his dinner.

If he had been told that the cure was effected by books he would
have been profoundly skeptical, and perhaps wisely so. But although
Madeleine felt an almost passionate gratitude for Masters, she gave
him little thought except when a new package of books arrived, or
when she discussed them briefly with him in Society. He had never
called.

But her mind flowered like a bit of tropical country long neglected
by rain. She had thought that the very seeds of her mental desires
were dead, but they sprouted during a long uninterrupted afternoon
and grew so rapidly they intoxicated her. Masters had sent her in
that first offering poets who had not become fashionable in Boston
when she left it: Browning, Matthew Arnold and Swinburne; besides the
Byron and Shelley and Keats of her girlhood. He sent her Letters and
Essays and Memoirs and Biographies that she had never read and those
that she had and was glad to read again. He sent her books on art and
she re-lived her days in the galleries of Europe, understanding for
the first time what she had instinctively admired.