her hands, with little unsuspected curlicues of humor and fancy making
the stiff "t's" bend and twisting the tails of the "e's," to the little
scrunched-up "Love, Nancy" at the end, as if she had squeezed it there to
make it look unimportant, knowing perfectly that it was the one really
important thing in the letter to him. Both would take it so and be thankful
without greediness or a longing for sentimental "x's," with a sense that
the thing so given must be very rich in little like a jewel, and always
newly rediscovered with a shiver of pure wonder and thanking, or neither
could have borne to have it written so small.

It was Nancy just as some of her clothes were Nancy, soft clear blues and
first appleblossom pinks, the colors of a hardy garden that has no need for
the phoenix-colors of the poppy, because it has passed the boy's necessity
for talking at the top of its voice in scarlet and can hold in one shaped
fastidious petal, faint-flushed with a single trembling of one serene
living dye, all the colors the wise mind knows and the soul released into
its ecstasy has taken for its body invisible, its body of delight most
spotless, as lightning takes bright body of rapture and agony from the
light clear pallor that softens a sky to night.

Oliver read the letter over twice--it was with a satisfaction like that
when body and brain are fed at once, invisibly, by the same lustre of
force, that he put it away. One part of it, though, left him humanly
troubled enough.

"Miss Winters, the old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as
usual yesterday--the same old business--I might be studying in Paris, now,
instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't 'formed'
what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I minded,
really, though I was angry enough to bite her when she gave a long