But he sniffed out his disgust with "as the poet says." "It wasn't so bad when we were in the hotel, and she was busy with something else.

But now--but now--" he repeated it the third time, "but now--honest, every time that woman goes to get up a paper for the Hypatia Club, she gets me in the parlour, and rehearses it to me, and the dad-binged thing is simply packed full of 'as the poet sayses.' And about that marriages being made in heaven, I tell my wife this: I say, 'Maybe so, but if they are, I know one that was made on a busy day when the angels were thinking of something else.'" And John Barclay, who knew Mrs.Mason and knew Lycurgus, knew that he would as soon think of throwing a bomb at the President as to say such a thing to her; so John asked credulously: "You did?
Well, well! Say, what did she say to that ?" "That's it--" responded Lycurgus.

"That's it.

What could she say?
I had her." He walked the length of the room proudly, with his hands thrust into his pockets.
Barclay moved his chair to the rear of the car, where he sat smoking and looking into the clear star-lit heavens above the desert.

And his mind went back thirty years to the twilight in June after he had set off the powder keg in the culvert under Main Street in Sycamore Ridge, and he tried to remember how Jane Mason got over from Minneola--did he bring her over the day before, or was she visiting at the Culpeppers', or did she come over that day?
It puzzled him, but he remembered well that in the Congregational choir he and Jane sang a duet in an anthem, "He giveth his beloved sleep." And he hummed the old aria, a rather melancholy tune, as he sat on the car platform in Arizona that night, and her voice came back--a deep sweet contralto that took "G" below middle "C" as clearly as a tenor, and in her lower register there was a passion and a fire that did not blaze in the higher notes.