the gallery with the shapes of stone until she found an empty seat directly beneath the gaze of the Elgin marbles. She looked at them, and seemed, as usual, borne up on some wave of exaltation and emotion, by which her life at once became solemn and beautiful—an impression which was due as much, perhaps, to the solitude and chill and silence of the gallery as to the actual beauty of the statues. One must suppose, at least, that her emotions were not purely esthetic, because, after she had gazed at the Ulysses for a minute or two, she began to think about Ralph Denham. So secure did she feel with these silent shapes that she almost yielded to an impulse to say “I am in love with you” aloud. The presence of this immense and enduring beauty made her almost alarmingly conscious of her desire, and at the same time proud of a feeling which did not display anything like the same proportions when she was going about her daily work.
She repressed her impulse to speak aloud, and rose and wandered about rather aimlessly among the statues until she found herself in another gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls, and her emotion took another turn. She began to picture herself traveling with Ralph in a land where these monsters were couchant in the sand. “For,” she thought to herself, as she gazed fixedly at some information printed behind a piece of glass, “the wonderful thing about you is that you’re ready for anything; you’re not in the least conventional, like most clever men.”
And she conjured up a scene of herself on a camel’s back, in the desert, while Ralph commanded a whole tribe of natives.
“That is what you can do,” she went on, moving on to the next statue. “You always make people do what you want.”
A glow spread over her spirit, and filled her eyes with brightness. Nevertheless, before she left the Museum she
