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the world turned radiant, and while she was with him she was aware of nothing but his charm and his genius for laughter. Kester laughed at everything. Bad weather, bumpy roads, the foibles of other people—Kester found them not irritating, but funny. Though she was by nature rather opinionated Eleanor found herself reflecting his tolerance. She thought she must have laughed more in the weeks she had known Kester than in all her lifetime before.
    Except for some spontaneous gesture such as taking her hands and holding them while he told her how glad he was to see her again, Kester had never touched her, but his joy at being with her was evident. They took long drives through the plantation country, rattling over the roads in his little topless car or sometimes moving more sedately in a carriage. They crossed the river on a ferry and visited a sugar plantation where the cane-cutting season was not yet over, and the Negroes peeled cane for them while they sucked out the juice, which trickled down their chins and stickied their clothes and made them nearly sick with an excess of sweetness. They found an old Negro who ground his own cane to make molasses for his family, in an ancient shed thatched with palm branches such as the earliest planters used when cane sugar was new; subject as everybody was to Kester’s charm, he let them feed the stalks between the two big wooden wheels turned by mules, and they shouted with delight as the juice dripped into the kettle over the fire. Kester bought from him two big buckets of cuite, the thick dark molasses that is the last boiling of the syrup before it turns to sugar, and gave one of them to Eleanor to serve with hot biscuits for supper, warning her to serve it with a wooden spoon, for if you put a metal spoon into cuite it will granulate before morning.
    Once they took a picnic lunch and drove toward the woods, stopping on a road built along the edge of a cypress swamp. They had hardly left the carriage when a mighty rain tumbled upon them, so they scrambled back inside and sat huddled under the rug. Around them the swamp had a strange loveliness. The great cypresses were hung with moss in such thick draperies that there seemed hardly room for leaves to push through, though occasionally one of the trees was bare, holding up crooked white limbs to the rain. The leaves on the live oaks were dull, ready to drop when the new leaves would push them off in March. The only bright color in the swamp was the green of the tree-ferns growing along the branches. Under the oaks the sedges were brown, with a purplish tinge like a veil over them, and the lichens were gray on the cypress trunks growing out of the water, and over everything was the gray moss and the rain.
    It was Kester who showed her the sullen magnificence of the swamp, while Eleanor looked, discovering the joy of becoming sensitive to the beauty of familiar scenes. When at last they drove back through the rain she felt as if she had been on a journey to a place of strange enchantment.
    Often they went to Ardeith, and when she curled up on the rug by the fire and talked to him—on any subject, for sometimes she could hardly remember what they had talked about—Eleanor had a sense of rapture.
    When she went to Ardeith, Kester’s parents were sometimes, though not always, at home. While they were invariably gracious Eleanor could not help regarding them with a secret amusement. Denis and Lysiane, and their numberless cousins who drifted through the house, seemed to her so delicate, like relics that should be kept behind glass. It was the first time she had had a glimpse of the gentle, defeated civilization that in secluded spots like this went on still stunned from the blow of the Civil War. These people were strange to her, yet she could not deny that they had a curious emotional security because it had never occurred to them to doubt their own values. She was continually being surprised at their cool, devastating scorn of people