I understood that clearly, for the first time. This
revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might
suddenly vanish.
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across
the harvest field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an
actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and
underneath it stood the mournful line: Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit.
III
IN Lincoln the best part of the theatrical season came late, when the good
companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long runs in
New York and Chicago. That spring Lena went with me to see Joseph
Jefferson in "Rip Van Winkle," and to a war play called "Shenandoah." She
was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said she was in business
now, and she would n't have a schoolboy spending his money on her. I liked
to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything
was true. It was like going to revival meetings with some one who was
always being converted. She handed her feelings over to the actors with a
kind of fatalistic resignation. Accessories of costume and scene meant
much more to her than to me. She sat entranced through "Robin Hood" and
hung upon the lips of the contralto who sang, "Oh, Promise Me!"
Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in
those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which
two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an
actress of whom I had often heard, and the name "Camille.
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