Gloria had lulled¹ Anthony's mind to sleep. She, who seemed of all women the wisest and the finest, hung like a brilliant curtain across his doorways², shutting out the light of the sun. In those first years what he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always through the pattern of the curtain.

It was a sort of lassitude that brought them back to Marietta for another summer. Through a golden enervating⁴ spring they had loitered, restive⁵ and lazily extravagant⁶, along the California coast, joining other parties intermittently⁷ and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado, from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than Gloria's desire to dance by different music or catch some infinitesimal variant¹⁰ among the changing colors of the sea. Out of the Pacific there rose to greet them savage¹¹ rocklands and equally barbaric hostelries built that at tea-time one might drowse into a languid wicker bazaar¹² glorified¹³ by the polo costumes of Southhampton and Lake Forest and Newport and Palm Beach. And, as the waves met and splashed and glittered in the most placid¹⁵ of the bays, so they joined this group and that, and with them shifted stations, murmuring ever of those strange unsubstantial gaieties in wait just over the next green and fruitful valley.

A simple healthy leisure class it was--the best of the men not unpleasantly undergraduate--they seemed to be on a perpetual candidates list for some etherealized "Porcellian" or "