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286 me he wants to make me happy for life, and I've about decided I'll let him try. I see him—coming up our front walk. Coming to call on me—have I mentioned I've got a figure—a real sweet figure? That's about what romance means to me."

"Youth, dear?" asks Miss Norton gently.

"That's it, dearie," answered the older woman dreamily. "Youth."

For a time those about the table sat in silence, picturing no doubt the slender figure on the steps of that porch long ago. Not without a humorous sort of pity did they glance occasionally toward the woman whom Norton had begged to make happy. The professor of Comparative Literature was the first to break the silence.

"The dictionary," he remarked academically, "would define romance as a species of fictitious writing originally composed in the Romance dialects, and afterward in prose. But—the dictionary is prosaic, it has no soul. Shall I tell you what romance means to me? I will. I see a man toiling in a dim laboratory, where there are strange fires and stranger odors. Night and day