ploughed patch at the crossing of the roads
as the fittest place to talk to each other. We
sat down outside the sagging wire fence that
shut Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest
of the world. The tall red grass had never
been cut there. It had died down in winter
and come up again in the spring until it was
as thick and shrubby as some tropical garden-
grass. I found myself telling her everything:
why I had decided to study law and to go
into the law office of one of my mother's rela-
tives in New York City; about Gaston Cleric's
death from pneumonia last winter, and the
difference it had made in my life. She wanted
to know about my friends and my way of
living, and my dearest hopes.

"Of course it means you are going away
from us for good," she said with a sigh. "But
that don't mean I'll lose you. Look at my
papa here; he's been dead all these years, and
yet he is more real to me than almost any-
body else. He never goes out of my life. I
talk to him and consult him all the time. The
older I grow, the better I know him and the
more I understand him."

She asked me whether I had learned to like
big cities. "I'd always be miserable in a

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v?