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“Tell you the truth, Jess,” he said. “I’ve cut out the drink. Help yourself, of course. If you don’t mind I’ll try some of the seltzer straight.”

“You’ve stopped drinking?” she said, looking at him steadily and unsmilingly. “What for?”

“It wasn’t doing me any good,” said Bob. “Don’t you approve of the idea?”

Jessie raised her eyebrows and one shoulder slightly.

“Entirely,” she said with a sculptured smile. “I could not conscientiously advise any one to drink or smoke, or whistle on Sunday.”

The meal was finished almost in silence. Bob tried to make talk, but his efforts lacked the stimulus of previous evenings. He felt miserable, and once or twice his eye wandered toward the bottle, but each time the scathing words of his bibulous friend sounded in his ear, and his mouth set with determination.

Jessie felt the change deeply. The essence of their lives seemed to have departed suddenly. The restless fever, the false gayety, the unnatural excitement of the shoddy Bohemia in which they had lived had dropped away in the space of the popping of a cork. She stole curious and forlorn glances at the dejected Bob, who bore the guilty look of at least a wife-beater or a family tyrant.

After dinner the colored maid who came in daily to perform such chores cleared away the things. Jessie, with an unreadable countenance, brought back the bottle of Scotch and the glasses and a bowl of cracked ice and set them on the table.

“May I ask,” she said, with some of the ice in her tones, “whether I am to be included in your sudden spasm of goodness? If not, I’ll make one for myself. It’s rather chilly this evening, for some reason.”

“Oh, come now, Jess,” said Bob good-naturedly, “don’t be too rough on me. Help yourself, by all means. There’s no danger of your overdoing it. But I thought there was with me; and that’s why I quit. Have yours, and then let’s get out the banjo and try over that new quickstep.”

“I’ve heard,” said Jessie in the tones of the oracle, “that drinking alone is a pernicious habit. No, I don’t think I feel like playing this evening. If we are going to reform we may as well abandon the evil habit of banjo-playing, too.”

She took up a book and sat in her little willow rocker on the other side of the table. Neither of them spoke for half an hour.

And then Bob laid down his paper and got up with a strange, absent look on his face and went behind her chair and reached over her shoulders, taking her hands in his, and laid his face close to hers.

In a moment to Jessie the walls of the seine-hung room vanished, and she saw the Sullivan County hills and rills. Bob felt her hands quiver in his as he began the verse from old Omar:

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing!”

And then he walked to the table and poured a stiff drink of Scotch into a glass.

But in that moment a mountain breeze had somehow found its way in and blown away the mist of the false Bohemia.

Jessie leaped and with one fierce sweep of her hand sent the bottle and glasses crashing to the floor. The same motion of her arm carried it around Bob’s neck, where it met its mate and fastened tight.

“Oh, my God, Bobbie–not that verse–I see now. I wasn’t always such a fool, was I? The other one, boy–the one that says: ‘Remould it to the Heart’s Desire.’ Say that one–‘to the Heart’s Desire.'”

“I know that one,” said Bob. “It goes:”

“‘Ah! Love, could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire
Would not we–‘”

“Let me finish it,” said Jessie.

“‘Would not we shatter it to bits–and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!'”

“It’s shattered all right,” said Bob, crunching some glass under his heel.

In some dungeon below the accurate ear of Mrs. Pickens, the landlady, located the smash.

“It’s that wild Mr. Babbitt coming home soused again,” she said. “And he’s got such a nice little wife, too!”