conscious of this together with a clear recognition of his faults, and
quite aside from both existed her unreasoning affection. The latter
vividly dominated her, shut out, on any occasion of stress, all else; but
for the most part she held him in an attitude of mildly amused
comprehension.

Gerrit Ammidon she hadn't seen until after her engagement to William, and
she sometimes thought of the former in connection with marriage. Gerrit,
she admitted to herself, was a far more romantic figure than William; not
handsomer--William Ammidon was very good looking--but more arresting,
with his hair swinging about his ears and intense blue gaze. An exciting
man, she decided again, for whom one would eternally put on the loveliest
clothes possible; a man to make you almost as ravishingly happy as
miserable, and, therefore, disturbing as a husband.

At this her mind returned to her gray hair and the fact that the metal
backlog of the kitchen fire, which supplied the house with hot water, had
been leaking over the hearth. A feeling of melancholy possessed her at
the turning of younger visions into commonplace necessities, but she
dismissed it with the shadow of a smile--it was absurd for a woman of her
age to dwell on such frivolous things. Yet she still lingered to wonder
if men too kept intact among their memories the radiant image of their
youth, if they ever thought of it with tenderness and extenuation. She
decided in the negative, convinced that men, even at the end of many
years, never definitely lost connection with their early selves, there
was always a trace of hopefulness, of jaunty vanity--sometimes winning
and sometimes merely ridiculous--attached to their decline.

Rhoda stirred and moved to a window, gazing vaguely out into the moist
blue obscurity. Sidsall, she realized, was maturing with a disconcerting