Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/312

304 they're just as they were—not an object moved, not an arrangement altered, not a person but ourselves coming in: they're only exquisitely kept. All our presents are there—I should have liked you to see them.'

It had become a torment by this time—I saw that I had made a mistake. But I carried it off. 'Oh, I couldn't have borne it!'

'They're not sad,' he smiled—'they're too lovely to be sad. They're happy. And the things!' He seemed, in the excitement of our talk, to have them before him.

'They're so very wonderful?'

'Oh, selected with a patience that makes them almost priceless. It's really a museum. There was nothing they thought too good for her.'

I had lost the museum, but I reflected that it could contain no object so rare as my visitor. 'Well, you've helped them—you could do that.

He quite eagerly assented. 'I could do that, thank God—I could do that! I felt it from the first, and it's what I have done.' Then as if the connection were direct: 'All my things are there.'

I thought a moment. 'Your presents?'

'Those I made her. She loved each one, and I remember about each the particular thing she said. Though I do say it,' he continued, 'none of the others, as a matter of fact, come near mine. I look at them every day, and I assure you I'm not ashamed.' Evidently, in short, he had spared nothing, and he talked on and on. He really quite swaggered.

 VIII

relation to times and intervals I can only recall that if this visit of his to me had been in the early spring it was one day in the late autumn—a day, which couldn't have been in the same year, with the difference of hazy, drowsy sunshine