But though Sophy yielded to these first bewildering moments of sudden glamour, she was not in the least minded to enter into a long, unbroken, spellbound dalliance. Loring found himself very short of kisses indeed during the next few weeks.

Sophy, as it were, got her head above those heavy, golden waves. She gasped deep of the fresh air of reason. She would not sink down to this strange, love-lighted underworld without a final struggle for freedom, for the clear daylight of common sense. He had to listen to much plain speaking. Sometimes he sulked, sometimes fumed; usually he ended by laughing with that low laughter against which she felt so oddly helpless. There is nothing in the world more disconcerting than this low, mocking laughter of love that knows itself stronger than reason. In vain Sophy pointed out to him the difference in their ages, in their tastes (this he furiously denied). She sternly bade him listen while she read aloud from books that were her daily food. He listened with heroism.

But one evening over Plotinus he actually nodded. They had been hunting. The geranium-scented warmth of her study, the soft crackle of the fire, her lulling contralto voice as she read aloud to him the words of the mystic whom he privately thought "a hipped old Johnny" because he was so ashamed of having a body that he wouldn't tell his birth-date ... (How Loring despised him for this denial of ruddy life!)—these things, together with the deep comfort of the old, leather armchair in which he sat, caused him to doze pleasantly. He woke with a jerk, at the sudden stopping of her voice. Her grey eyes were fixed on him over the volume of Plotinus, cool and smiling.

"You see?" she said. "What rouses my soul puts you to sleep!"

Loring had looked at her sombrely.

"I'll tell you what I think," he had said at last. "I think you fence yourself about with these old philosopher Johnnies because you're afraid of love. That's what I think, Beautiful."

Sophy had coloured, which always delighted him. He felt that he had won when her blood rose at his words.

She pointed out to him the complications that would arise in their life together, from the fact that Bobby would have to be educated in England.

"I couldn't possibly let him go there alone," she said. "His grandmother dislikes me, as I've told you. She'd do all in her power to wean him from me. And it's absolutely right and necessary that he should grow up an Englishman...."

"He can grow up a Timbuctooan, for all I care," Loring had replied, unmoved. "I've always wanted to hunt in the 'Shires. We can have a country place near Melton...."

"You'd expatriate yourself?" Sophy asked severely.

"Nonsense, Diana! You're too Olympian sometimes. Good Americans can live all over the place and still feel that 'little old New York is good enough for them.'"

"There's another thing," Sophy had retorted: "I am sure that I shan't care for New York—and as ... well, as Mrs. Loring, I should have to live there...."

"Only a bit in the winter. And it would do you good, Beautiful. You like homage—you know you do. You'd be first and beautifulest there. Thank God, I'm so rotten rich!... You'll queen it, I can tell you."

"Are you so rich, Morris?"

"I am—rather. Why?"

"Because that's another thing.... I hate this over-richness of some Americans. I feel as if my throat and eyes were full of gold-dust when I'm with them. I don't mean I'm such a goose as to despise money—but I do hate this ... this sort of golden Elephantiasis that deforms so many Americans...."

Loring gazed up at her with wondering adoration.

"By George!" he said humbly, "it's downright awe-inspiring to feel that you don't care a hang for my being rich. That you only care ... what little you do care ... for me, myself."

"'King Midas has the ears of an ass,'" Sophy had laughed, pulling the one next her.

He had responded only too quickly to this slight caress. She had to put both hands to her face to shield herself from his eager kisses.

"Ah, dearest—be kind.... Do.... Ah, do!" he had pleaded. But she had said, "No.... I shall be sensible—if that's being unkind.... I won't be rushed into elf-land by the hair of my head. I.... I won't be ... honeyfuggled...."

And they had laughed together.

Sophy finally got quite desperate with the fruitless struggle against him and against herself. She banished him ruthlessly for two weeks. He rebelled in vain. "I must have this time quite to myself," she told him. "I must think things out ... alone."

Loring found himself frantic thus exiled to the Macfarlanes, cut off from his heart's desire by six country miles as by the powers of darkness. He fled to Florida for a fortnight's tarpon-fishing. Then came her letters. He thought he should go mad over those letters. She played on him like the wind on water. Now he was all melting ripples under her delicate words—now some phrase sent his passion leaping mountain-high.... In the last letter she said: "Come back to me.... I miss you as the rose misses the honey from her heart ... as the stem misses the gathered flower.... I crave you as a sail might crave the wild wind that gives it life. Dear ... my dearest.... I know now why the 'wisdom of men is foolishness to God.'... God is Love ... my wisdom is foolishness to Love.... So I give you my foolish wisdom for a carpet under your feet. And my wise foolishness I give you for a seal upon your heart.... But myself I cannot give you, for I was yours when Love spread the foundations of the world...."

For she had found when Loring was far from her that "her heart was within him." She found the plain, wheaten bread of Philosophy dreary fare without the honey of romance. Poetry fled from her like a wild, shy bird, that would only come to one call. With his name she could lure it. She wrote page after page of love-verse as a sort of bridal offering for his return. She knew that there was madness in her mood, but it seemed a high and holy sort of frenzy—like the spiritual dementia that sends martyrs singing to the pyre. So she sung amid the flames that so exquisitely consumed her. For this was not a usual passion that she felt for Loring. She would have preferred that their love-life should be one long, ecstatic betrothal. She would have liked to give him the flower of love without its fruit. Yet his love was so different from all other loves that she had known ... it was so finely winged—so woven with adoration ... so fresh as with the dews of youth's first dawn; in her the answering love was so immaculate, veiled with imagination as for a first communion; all was so beautifully and perfectly harmonious between them, that she could not imagine discord ever following on this enchanted symphony.

And granted that their tastes were not always the same ... granted that she was older, that he seemed but a boy to her at times—must love mean oneness in all things? Was not oneness of heart and spirit enough? And was not woman immemorially older than man—the first created, but not the first conceived?—Did not the Christian faith give even God a mother, as if Divinity itself must needs be child of the eternal feminine?

And because the great, tender mother in her cherished Loring, the shy, wild lover in her only loved him more.