Vance, when he carried off Laura Lou, had never thought of the possibility of having to live at Paul's Landing. Vague visions of life in a New York boarding house had flitted through his mind, or rather lurked scarce-visible on its edge; but till he had persuaded Laura Lou to come to him nothing had seemed real or near at hand save the bliss he craved, and before four days of that bliss were over he understood that he lacked the experience and the money to make any sort of home for her. They were lucky to have Mrs. Tracy to turn to; her conditional forgiveness, and the shelter of her tumbledown roof, were the best they could expect—unless Mapledale Avenue should intervene. But Vance had small expectation of help from home. He had been startled back to a sense of reality by Mrs. Tracy's question; for he had not meant to conceal his marriage from his parents, but had simply forgotten all about them. From the very moment—less than a fortnight ago—when he had stepped out of the Grand Central and seen Laura Lou in the rubberneck car, he had thought of nothing else—hardly even of his art. The sight of her, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand had rapt him away from common values and dimensions into that mystic domain to which he sometimes escaped from the pressure of material things. To that domain Laura Lou at the moment held the key, as hitherto great poetry had held it, the sunrise from Thundertop, his first sight of the sea, his plunge into the past in the library at the Willows, or any of the other imaginative shocks that flung open the gates of wonder. But the world to which Laura Lou admitted him seemed to comprise all the others, and it was not till he woke from his first ecstasy that he saw she herself was not an extra-terrestrial joy but a solid earthly fact, capable of apprehending only the earthly bounds out of which her beauty had lifted him. Laura Lou, dispenser of raptures, was merely a human being to be fed, clothed, cherished—what was it the minister had said?—in sickness and in health, till death should them part. And as long as they were together it could be only (to her at least) in the world of food, clothes, salary, sickness or health, prosperity or failure, mothers-in-law or boarding houses. As Vance went up to bed, after a drawn battle in the cold dimly lit dining room with his first "Cocoanut Tree" article, he reflected: "Well, anyway, I know it makes her happy to be back here," and bent his impetuous neck to the yoke.