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By Root 14640 0

when the Governor had not been the marmoreal brow in the massy gold frame but a tall man sitting with his feet on the hearthrug with a little girl, a child, on a hassock at his feet, leaning her head against his knee and gazing into the fire while his large man hand toyed deliciously with the loose, silken hair. But I was here now because Anne Stanton, no longer a little girl, had said, “Come on out to the Landing, we’re just going back for Saturday night and Sunday, just to build a fire and eat something out of a can and sleep under the roof again. It’s all the time Adam can spare. And he can’t spare that much often now.” So I had come, carrying my question.

I heard the match rasp, and turned from the sea, which was dark now. The flame had caught the fat of the light-wood and was leaping up and spewing little stars like Christmas sparklers, and the light danced warmly on Anne Stanton’s leaning face and then on her throat and cheek as, still crouching, she looked up at me when I approached the hearth. Her eyes were glittering like the eyes of a child when you give a nice surprise, and she laughed in a sudden throaty, tingling way. It is a way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of a face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman’s name and address hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shoes and with hands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.

So Anne looked up at me with the glittering eyes and laughed that way while the firelight glowed on her cheek. Then I laughed, too, looking down at her. She reached up her hand to me, and I took it and helped her as she rose easy and supple–God, how I hate a woman who scrambles up off things–and I still held her hand as she swayed at the instant of reaching her full height. She was very close to me, with the laughter still on her face–and echoing somehow deep inside me–and I was holding her hand, as I had held her up to stand swaying for an instant in front of me before I could put my arm around her and feel her waist surrender supplely to the cup of my hand. It had been that way. So now I must have leaned toward her and for an instant the trace of the laughter was still on her face, and her head dropped a little back the way a girl’s head does when she expects you to put your arm around her and doesn’t care if you do.

But all at once the laughter was gone. It was as though someone had pulled a shade in front of her face. I felt as you do when you pass down a dark street and look up to see a lighted window and in the bright room people talking and singing and laughing with the firelight splashing and undulating over them and the sound of the music drifts out to the street while you watch; and then a hand, you will never know whose hand, pulls down the shade. And there you are, outside.

And there I was, outside.

Maybe I should have done it anyway, put my arm around her. But I didn’t. She had looked up at me and had laughed that way. But not for me. Because she was happy to be there again in the room which held the past time–of which I had been a part, indeed, but was no longer a part–and to be kneeling on the hearth with the new heat of the fire laid on her face like a hand.

It had not