mantle.

For the trees, mostly maples of slight stature, clustered thickly
about the hotel, and their branches mingled in a restless pattern of
blacks and silvers and dim greens that mimicked the laughter of the
sea under an April wind. Looking down from the piazza, over the
expanse of tree-tops, all this was strangely like the sea; and it gave
one, somehow, much the same sense of remote, unbounded spaces and of a
beauty that was a little sinister. At times whippoorwills called to
one another, eerie and shrill; and the distant dance-music was a
vibration in the air, which was heavy with the scent of bruised
growing things and was filled with the cool, healing magic of the
moonlight.

Taking it all in all, we had blundered upon a very beautiful place.
And there we sat for a while and talked in an aimless fashion. We did
not know quite how one ought to "sit out" a dance, you conceive....


4

Then, moved by some queer impulse, I stared over the railing for a
little at this great, wonderful, ambiguous world, and said solemnly:

"It is good."

"Yes," Stella agreed, in a curious, quiet and tiny voice, "it--it's
very large, isn't it?" She looked out for a moment over the tree-tops.
"It makes me feel like a little old nothing," she said, at last. "The
stars are so big, and--so uninterested." Stella paused for an