"Why, Alice was you! You were Alice all the time!" he exclaimed energetically.
"You mean--" She checked herself in alarm, paralyzed the next instant by the tremendous, unexpected blow of her discovery.
"So you thought there was somebody else!" The delight in his face kept her silent, amazed, incapable of explanation.

His arm was still outstretched, as if he were brushing aside the last flimsy barrier between them, and his voice, with its unrestrained and radiant joy, stirred some faintly quivering echoes in the secret depths of her being.
It was as if the jubilant spirit of spring had flowered suddenly in his look.
"There wasn't anybody else." He came still nearer, and she stood there, startled, incredulous, powerless either to retreat or to prevent the inevitable instant that was approaching.

"At least, there wasn't anybody I ever knew named Alice except a school teacher when I was a kid.

She was good and she was pretty like you, and I used to dream about her after school, and every evening at dusk I would go out of my way to speak to her in Sixth Avenue.

Once she told me that she'd wait for me to grow up and get rich so I could marry her, and after I went out to Arizona I used to think about her a lot.