She turned to him, and caught at his hand. "Oh, Neale, now I do know
what it is, how utterly hideous it would be to have to live without it,
to feel only the mean little trickle that seems mostly all that people
have."
"Well, I'll never have to get along without it, as long as I have you,"
he said confidently.
"And I refuse to live a minute, if it goes back on me!" she cried.
"I imagine that old folks would think we are talking very young,"
suggested the man casually.
"Don't speak of them!" She cast them away into non-existence with a
gesture.
They sank into a reverie, smiling to themselves.
"How the fountains shone in the sun, that day," she murmured; "the spray
they cast on us was all tiny opals and diamonds."
"You're sure you aren't going to be sorry to go back to America to live,
to leave all that?" asked the man. "I get anxious about that sometimes.
It seems an awful jump to go away from such beautiful historic things,
back to a narrow little mountain town."
"I'd like to know what right you have to call it narrow, when you've
never even seen it," she returned.
"Well, anybody could make a pretty fair guess that a small Vermont town
isn't going to be so very wide," he advanced reasonably.
"It may not be wide, but it's deep," she replied.
He laughed at her certainty. "You were about eleven years old when you
saw it last, weren't you?"
"No, you've got it wrong. It was when we came to France to live that I
was eleven, and of course I stopped going to Ashley regularly for
vacations then. But I went back for several summers in the old house
with Cousin Hetty, when I was in America for college, after Mother
died."
"Oh well, I don't care what it's like," he said, "except that it's the
place where I'm going to live with you. Any place on earth would seem
wide enough and deep enough, if I had you there."
"Isn't it funny," she mused, "that I should know so much more about it
than you? To think how I played all around your uncle's mill and house,
lots of times when I was a little girl, and never dreamed . . ."
"No funnier than all the rest of it," he demurred. "Once you grant our
existing and happening to meet out of all the millions of people in the
world, you can't think up anything funnier. Just the little
two-for-a-cent queerness of our happening to meet in Rome instead of in
Brooklyn, and your happening to know the town where my uncle lived and
owned the mill he left me . . . that can't hold a candle for queerness,
for wonderfulness, compared to my having ever laid eyes on you. Suppose
I'd never come to Rome at all? When I got the news of Uncle Burton's
death and the bequest, I was almost planning to sail from Genoa and not
come to southern Italy at all."