The Gates Between

Her name was Helen; like hers of old

"Who fired the topmost towers of Ilium."

I liked the stately name of her, for she was of full womanhood,--thirty-three years old; the age at which the French connoisseur said that a charming woman charmed the most.

Upon the evening before we parted, I ventured--for we sat at the sheltered end of the piazza, away from the patterers and chatterers, a little by ourselves--to ask her a brave question. I had learned that one might ask her anything; she had originality; she was not of the feminine pattern; she had no paltriness nor pettiness in her thoughts; she looked out, as men do, upon a subject; not down, as women are wont. She was a woman with whom a man could