Vance slept nearly as long as he had metaphorically accused the inhabitants of Paul’s Landing of doing. When he woke he saw a pattern of rippling foliage on the ceiling of his room, and a bar of sunlight lying across the floor. The air that came in through the window was sultry with heat, and flies buzzed against the pane. Looking about him at the streaked and faded wallpaper, his clothes heaped up on a broken-down verandah chair, and the water jug with a chipped spout on the old-fashioned washstand, he felt a qualm of homesickness, and thought longingly of the spring sunsets across the fields at Crampton, and the perfume of his grandmother’s neglected lilacs. So strong was the impression that the perfume was actually in his nostrils. He raised himself on his elbow, and there, on the pillow, lay a spray of white lilac, filling the room with June.

“Well, that’s nice of them,” Vance thought, burying his face in the ivory-coloured clusters. He remembered his grandmother’s once saying, as they sat on the Crampton porch on a hot June evening: “I guess that box of ointment Mary Magdalen broke over our Lord’s feet must have been made out of lilacs,” and he had liked the fancy, and wished he knew how to make a poem out of it, rich and heavy with perfumed words. His grandmother’s random fancies often stirred his imagination in this way.

Upton, he supposed, or perhaps Mrs. Tracy, must have come in while he was asleep, and dropped the flower on his pillow because he had told them there were lilacs at Grandma Scrimser’s. “Upton most likely,” he mused. “Good little fellow — seems to have gardens on the brain.” He took another deep whiff of the flower, tumbled out of bed, filled the cracked basin with water, and plunged his head into it. After that the currents of activity reawoke, and he hurried through his washing and dressing, impatient to be down, for his watch told him it was after midday, and he was ashamed to be so late on his first morning.

His window looked out on the back of the house. Close to it were the trees which had drawn their fitful pencillings on the ceiling above his bed; and beyond was a small patch of vegetables, divided in oblongs by currant and gooseberry bushes, and fenced off from other vegetable gardens which sloped up the hillside to the irregular fringes of a wood. More trees — trees everywhere, trees taller, fuller and more heavy-branched, he thought, than those of his native prairies. Up the hillside they domed themselves in great bluish masses, one against the other, like the roofs of some mysterious city built of leaves. Vance was pleased with that fancy too, and would have liked to stop and put it into verse, as well as his grandmother’s idea about the lilacs. The rhyming faculty, long abeyant, stirred in him again under the spell of the unfamiliar scene, and the caress of the summer morning, and he forgot about his haste to leave his room, and his scruples lest breakfast should have been kept for him, and sat down at the table in the window, pulling his pen and a scrap of paper from his pocket. Since his little-boyhood his pockets had never been without scraps of paper.

“Arcane, aloof, and secret as the soul — ” He liked that, for the first line of the poem about the city built of leaves, which was of course a forest. Secret as the soul. There were times when his own soul was like a forest, full of shadows and murmurs — arcane, aloof — a place to lose one’s way in, a place fearsome, almost, to be alone in. And then: secret. That too was true. He often felt as if his own soul were a stranger inside of him, a stranger speaking a language he had never learned, or had forgotten. And there again was a good idea; the idea of the mysterious stranger within one’s self, closer than one’s bones and yet with a face and speech forever unknown to one. His heart was beating with a rush of inarticulate eloquence, words and waves of feeling struggling to fit into each other and become thought and music.

“Heavy with all the scent of summers gone — ” how would that do for the lilac? No, TOO heavy. He wanted to say that the mere scent of the lilac was rich enough for bees to make honey out of it; to say that lightly, whirringly, like bees humming about before they settle. And then one organ note at the close, where the box of ointment is broken, and Christ likens the Magdalen’s gesture to the perfume of holiness, the lovely fragrance it should give out, but so often does not. Scentless holiness . . . there too was something to write about. How one image beckoned another! And he couldn’t stop them, often couldn’t detain them long enough to trace their lineaments before they vanished . . . .

He scribbled on in the stuffy untidy room, beside his tumbled bed, the flies banging against the windowpane, the bar of hot sunlight wheeling slowly across the wall, scribbled on oblivious of time and place, of his wholesome morning hunger, of the fact that he was in a strange household where his nonappearance might be inconvenient or perplexing. Words for one poem, then for the other, continued to surge up, mingling, confused and exciting, in his half-awakened brain. Sometimes he lingered on one for the sake of its own beauty, and suddenly a new poem would bud from it, as if the word had been a seed plunged into the heated atmosphere of his imagination. Disconnected, unmeaning, alluring, they strung themselves out on one bit of paper after another, till he threw down his pen and buried his rumpled head in his hands.

Through his dream he heard a knock, and started up. It was Mrs. Tracy coming in with a cup of coffee. He mustn’t mind about having slept so long, she told him at once — it was the best thing for him, after his illness and the long journey. “Sleep is the young people’s best doctor,” she said with one of her sad smiles. “But you didn’t eat much last night, and you’d better drink this coffee right off, while it’s hot. It won’t keep you from wanting your dinner by and by, I hope.” She put the tray down beside him while he stammered his excuses, and went on, in the same friendly tone, with a glance at the litter of paper at his elbow: “If you’ve got any work to get through, I guess you’ll be cooler down on the back porch than here; there’s a little breeze from the river. We always get one of these heat waves in June.”

Vance thanked her, and said he would come down at once, and she added, designating the lilac blossom in his coat: “But I see you’ve been down already, haven’t you? You’re like me — you love lilacs.”

“Then it wasn’t she who brought it,” he thought; and answered, colouring, that, yes, he thought they had the best smell of any flower he knew, but he hadn’t been down yet, and he guessed Upton must have brought the flower in while he was sleeping.

Mrs. Tracy, he thought, coloured a little too; there was a hint of surprise in her eyes. “Why, maybe he did,” she acquiesced; and slid away on her soft soles, leaving him to his belated coffee.

The day passed uneventfully. In spite of his long sleep Vance still felt the weariness of convalescence, and the excitement of his changed surroundings. Disappointment also, the feeling that he was somehow being cheated out of hoped-for experiences, oppressed his tired nerves and left him for the moment without initiative, so that after dinner he was glad to accept Mrs. Tracy’s suggestion that he should return to the back porch and stretch out in the hammock.

Upton had hurried home for dinner, the nursery where he was employed not being far away; but Laura Lou’s seat was empty. Mrs. Tracy explained that she usually returned from school for the midday meal, but that she had accepted an invitation from a friend that day, and would not be back till evening.

Upton, his shyness worn off, talked eagerly about his work; his employer was hybridizing gladioluses, he explained, and also experimenting in crosses between Japanese and European tree~peonies. All this evidently meant nothing to Mrs. Tracy, who had a stock set of questions ready (Vance perceived) for both of her children, and had learned how to interrogate Upton about his horticultural experiments, and Laura Lou about her studies, without understanding their answers, or even affecting to. She struck Vance as a woman who had lived all her life among people whose language she could not speak, and had learned to communicate with them by signs, like a deaf-mute, while ministering watchfully to their material needs.

Having settled Vance in the hammock she went off with a slatternly woman who came in from one of the next houses to help with the washing; and Vance lay in the warm shade, and dozed, or let his mind wander over his half-written poems. But whenever he tried to write poetry nowadays the same thing happened: after the first few lines, which almost wrote themselves, the inspiration died out, or rather he felt that he didn’t know what to say next — that if his mind had contained more of the stuff of experience, words would have flocked of their own accord for its expression. He supposed it must take a good deal of experience to furnish the material for even a few lines of poetry; and though he was not prepared to admit that very little had happened to him, he could not but remember that he was only nineteen, and that there had not been time yet for any great accumulation of events. He finished the Magdalen poem about the lilacs, but haltingly, the expression flagging with the vision — and when it was done he leaned back, lit a cigarette, and thought with a smile what his restless inquisitive sister Mae would have said if she had known how he was spending his first day within reach of New York. “Well, I’ll get there all the same, and get to a newspaper office too,” he thought, setting his teeth in a last effort at doggedness before sleep once more overcame him.

That evening at supper Laura Lou again came in late. She wore a faded yellow muslin which became her, and looked flushed and animated; but she contributed no more to the conversation than on the previous day. Mrs. Tracy seemed tired, and more discouraged than ever — Vance supposed it was the washing. When supper was over, and they were going back to the porch, she said she guessed she’d go to bed early; and would Upton be sure to remember to put out the lamp in the hall, and fasten the door chain when they went upstairs? Upton said he would, and Mrs. Tracy turned back to speak through the window of the dining room, where she was clearing the table unaided by either of her children. “Don’t forget now, Upton; tomorrow’s Saturday, and it’s the Willows afternoon.”

“All right, Mother; I won’t.”

“You say that; and then you get home hours late for dinner,” his mother insisted nervously. “I wouldn’t wonder if Miss Halo came down herself tomorrow,” she added in an anxious tone.

“Oh, no, she won’t — not in this heat.”

“You always say that too, Upton; and then when you least expect it, she does come, or Mrs. Spear does, and you’re not there when they arrive. And of course they want to know where you are, and if we mean to keep on with the job or not; and I get all the blame. And I don’t see how I can get to the Willows myself tomorrow, with all the ironing still to do . . . .”

“Well, you needn’t, Mother. Laura Lou’ll have to go with me; that’s all.”

“Oh, will I?” murmured Laura Lou. She spoke under her breath, but loud enough for Vance to hear, as she sat in the summer darkness close to the hammock to which he had returned.

“Yes, Laura Lou’ll have to. You will, darling?” Mrs. Tracy, without waiting for the answer, which she perhaps feared would be negative, picked up a candlestick from the sideboard and slowly mounted the stairs.

Left alone, the young people relapsed into silence. Upton was evidently tired by his day’s work, and Vance was embarrassed by the presence of an inarticulate schoolgirl whose replies to his remarks took the form of a nervous giggle. “I wish her mother’d made her go to bed too,” he thought. He offered a cigarette to Upton, and then held out the packet to Laura Lou, who shook her head with another giggle.

“She’s tried, but they made her sick,” said Upton cruelly.

“Oh, Upton — ”

“Well, they do.” Her face wrinkled up as if she were about to cry. To change the subject, Vance questioned: “What did your mother mean by tomorrow being the afternoon for the Willows? What are the Willows?”

Upton answered indifferently: “It’s old Miss Lorburn’s place, out the other side of Paul’s Landing. Nobody’s lived there since she died, ages ago, and she left a funny will, and we have to go out once a fortnight and see to the house being aired and the knickknacks dusted. There’s a sort of hired man lives on the place, but he isn’t allowed into Miss Lorburn’s rooms, and Mother and I have to see that they’re kept clean, and just the way she left them.”

“Was this Miss Lorburn a relative of your father’s?”

“Oh, very distant, I guess. She left the place to one of her nephews, an old bachelor who never comes there; and it’s he who arranged for Mother to keep an eye on things.”

Vance meditated, his interest beginning to stir. “What sort of a place is it?”

“I don’t know, nothing particular. Just an old house.”

AN OLD HOUSE! Upton spoke the words indifferently, almost contemptuously: they seemed to signify nothing to him. But they stirred Vance’s blood. An old house! It occurred to him that he had never seen a really old house in his life. But Upton was young — a good deal younger than himself. What did he mean by the epithet? His perspectives were probably even shorter than Vance’s.

“How old? As old as this house?” Vance questioned.

“Oh, ages older. My father used to go there when he was a little boy. It was an old house then. He could just remember seeing old Miss Lorburn, Mother says. She lived to be very old. She was a friend of my grandfather’s, I believe. It’s a dreary place anyhow. Laura Lou hates it. She says the rooms are full of ghosts, and she’s scared of it. But I say it’s because she hates missing her Saturday afternoon at the movies.”

“Upton — ” Laura Lou again protested.

“Well, you do. And Mother don’t like you to go to the Willows because you break things. But you’ll have to, tomorrow.”

Laura Lou made no answer, and Vance pursued his interrogatory. “And who are those ladies your mother spoke about, who come in and raise a row?”

“Oh, Mrs. Spear and her daughter. Mrs. Spear was a Lorburn. They won’t come tomorrow — not in this heat. If they’re here — and I’m not sure they are anyhow — ”

“Here? At Paul’s Landing?”

“Well, they live up at Eaglewood, another Lorburn place, a couple of miles from here, up the mountain. There’s a grand view of the river from there. It’s in the guidebooks. And they’re supposed to come down to the Willows now and then, and keep an eye on us, the way we do on the hired man.”

“How many Lorburn places are there round here?”

“They owned pretty near the whole place before the Revolution. Now there’s only these two houses left.”

“I suppose they had a big real estate boom, and got rid of everything?”

Upton chuckled incredulously in the dusk. “I don’t believe there’s ever been much boom of any kind about the Lorburns. They just got poorer and poorer and died off, I guess.”

Vance was genuinely puzzled. “Well, I don’t see why they couldn’t have worked up a boom and unloaded the stuff on somebody,” he murmured. Then he remembered Harrison Delaney’s incapacity in the same line, and his grandmother’s caustic comments on old families that have run to seed. He was glad that no aristocratic blood clogged his own lively circulation, and that, anyhow, there were no old families in a go-ahead place like Euphoria.

Upton got up and stretched his thin arms above his head. “Well, I’m going to get a move on toward bed. It was about 150 in that fernhouse this afternoon.” He groped his way between them, and went into the hall, banging the screen door after him in the instinctive defence against mosquitoes. From where Vance lay in the hammock he could see Upton put the chain across the front door, and bolt it.

Suddenly, close to him in the darkness, he heard Laura Lou say: “You’ve had that old lilac in your buttonhole all day. It smells all faded.” She bent above him and snatched it out of his coat. Instinctively he put up his hand to prevent her; his poem had made the withered blossom sacred. “Oh, don’t — ” But his hand, instead of the lilac, caught her soft fingers. They quivered, frightened yet entreating, and the warmth of her touch rushed through him, tempting, persuading; but she was no more than a little girl, awkward and ignorant, and he was under her mother’s roof. Besides, if it had not been for the heat and the darkness, and his mood of sensuous lassitude, he did not believe that even the touch of her soft skin would have roused him; the raw flapper had no charm for his unripe senses.

“Here — give it back! Listen to me, Laura Lou!” But she sprang out of reach with one of her maddening giggles, and he let her hand go, and the lilac with it, indifferently.

Upton came clumping back to the porch. “Going up to bed too?” he asked. Vance assented and tumbled out of the hammock. “All right. Then I’ll put the lamp out. Come along, Laura Lou.” To Vance he added: “Mother left a candle on the upper landing,” and he reached up to the swinging lamp, pulled it down, and filled the passage with the stench of its extinction. Laura Lou had already slipped up ahead of them to her mother’s room.