Treacherously it was, within my own citadel, at the very moment of my
coming. Gayly up the remembered path I went, under the flowering
horse-chestnut, to the little house standing back from the street, only
to find that, as of old, she blocked my way. She stood where the
pink-blossomed climber streamed up the columns of the little porch, and
her arm was twined among the strands to draw them to her face. She was
leaving,--but she had stayed too long; not the child with yellow braids,
humorously preserved in my memory, but a blossomed, a fruiting Eve, with
whilom braids massed high in a coronet, their gold a little tarnished.
Later it came to me to think that she was Spring, and had filched a crown
from Autumn. In that first glance, however, I could only wonder
instinctively if the tassels yet danced from her boot tops. I saw at
once that this might not any longer be known. One could only surmise
pleasantly. But straightway was I Atlas, stooping a little, rounding my
shoulders under the earth she deigned to walk upon.
And the disconcerting strangeness of it was in this: that though she was
no longer the woman child, yet with one flash of her gold-curtained eyes
had she reduced me to my ancient schoolboy clumsiness.
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