memory than they had been when lived, for the best remembrance makes only
brilliant ghosts, but they were in their dim measure nearer the soul's
perfection, for the tricks of the sounding board of the mind and the
feckless instrument of the body had been put away. "We've had infinites
already--infinites," thought Oliver, and didn't care about the ludicrous
ineptness of the words. He smiled, turning back to the unwritten letter. If
they hadn't had infinites already--he supposed they wouldn't want more so
badly right now. He smiled, but this time without humor. It had all seemed
so easy at first.

Nancy had been in Paris at fourteen before "business reverses" of the kind
that mild, capable-looking men like Mr. Ellicott seem to attract, as a
gingerbread man draws wasps, when they are about fifty, had reduced him to
a position as chief bookkeeper and taken Nancy out of her first year in
Farmington. Oliver had spent nine months on a graduate scholarship in Paris
and Provence in 1919. Both had friends there and argued long playful hours
planning just what sort of a magnificently cheap apartment on the _Rive
Gauche_ they would have when they went back.

For they were going back--they had been brilliantly sure of it--Oliver had
only to finish his novel that was so much better already than any novel
Nancy had ever read--sell a number of copies of it that seemed absurdly
small in proportion to the population of America--and then they could live
where they pleased and Oliver could compose Great Works and Nancy get ahead
with her very real and delicate talent for etching instead of having to do
fashion-drawings of slinky simperers in Lucile dresses or appetite-arousing
paintings of great cans of tomato soup. But that had been eight months ago.
Vanamee and Company's--the neat vice-president talking to Oliver--"a young
hustler has every chance in the world of getting ahead here, Mr. Crowe. You
speak French? Well, we have been thinking for some time of establishing