somewhere." For the first time I had the strange feeling Lucy didn't want Mae with her.
We saw Mae off to Congress in a drawing room filled with presents for Aunt Mabel, and at midnight we sailed in the S.S. Paris. A crowd, including Cleo and Hector, saw us off and our stateroom was jammed with hatboxes because Hector said we were to be his ambassadresses, as he thought he might open a Paris branch.
We were both champagne happy. Lucy's insistence that I go to Paris with her was a further omen to me that there was nothing between Paul and herself.
The crossing was beautiful with dancing every night and on the last night it seemed to me I didn't even doze, but all of a sudden the vibration stopped and there was an unnatural calm. I looked out the porthole and could see nothing in the dark. I lay there and with the first light of dawn heard the screeching of the gulls and I looked out again and saw Le Havre, a toy port with soft green hills across a still expanse of grey water.
The ship's throbbing started, like heartbeats, and the tugs came, and we watched the flat grey shuttered buildings come nearer, and from then on there was the bedlam of landing. I leaned over the rail and looked for Paul but could not see him. Then the gangplank was down and Lucy said, "What are you looking for? Let's go."
We walked down the gangplank and my coat button caught on the purse of the woman ahead and I stopped to detach it. When I looked up, Lucy had pushed ahead and was running toward him. He caught her in his arms and I saw love as inevitable as the majestic pavane of the sun and moon around the throneroom of heaven. And in the light they generated I saw that the interests I thought drew Vermillion and myself together were what had to keep us apart.
I felt I was dead and, as the train sped to Paris, I fixed my eyes on the countryside but saw nothing. I loved them both, separately, but seeing them together was more than I could bear until yesterday.
And so this is how I have learned that the poets are right, and I feel that maybe, somewhere, it may happen to me again. Perhaps Vermillion is not all that Lucy and I see in him. Per-