The Brimming Cup | Page 5

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."
She shook her head confidently. "You can't scare me with any such
hideous possibilities. It's not possible that we shouldn't ever have met,
both of us being in the world. Didn't you ever study chemistry? Didn't
they teach you there are certain elements that just will come together,
no matter how you mix them up with other things?"
He made no answer, gazing out across the plain far below them,
mellowing richly in the ever-softening light of the sunset.
She looked doubtfully at his profile, rather lean, with the beginning

already drawn of the deep American line from the Corner of the nose to
the mouth, that is partly humorous and partly grim. "Don't you believe
that, Neale, that we would have come together somehow, anyhow?" she
asked, "even if you had gone straight back from Genoa to Ashley?
Maybe it might have been up there after you'd begun to run the mill.
Maybe I'd have gone back to America and gone up to visit Cousin
Hetty again."
He was still silent.
She said urgently, as if in alarm, "Neale, you don't believe that we
could have passed all our lives and never have seen each other?"
He turned on her his deep-set eyes, full of tenderness and humor and
uncertainty, and shook his head. "Yes, dear, I do believe that," he said
regretfully. "I don't see how I can help believing it. Why, I hadn't the
faintest idea of going back to settle in Ashley before I met you. I had
taken Uncle Burton's mill and his bequest of four thousand dollars as a
sort of joke. What could I do with them, without anything else? And
what on earth did I want to do with them? Nothing! As far as I had any
plans at all, it was to go home, see Father and Mother for a while, get
through the legal complications of inheritance, sell the mill and
house . . . I wouldn't have thought of such a thing as bothering even to
go to Ashley to look at them . . . and then take the money and go off
somewhere, somewhere different, and far away: to China maybe. I was
pretty restless in my mind, pretty sure that nothing in our civilization
was worth the candle, you know, before you arrived on the scene to put
everything in focus. And if I had done all that, while you were still here
in Rome, running up and down your scales, honestly . . . I know I
sound awfully literal . . . but I don't see how we