It was first published in Smart Set in August 1920,[1] and it was republished in Youth and the Bright Medusa under the title of Coming, Aphrodite, with minor alterations.
They go up in a balloon and she feels special until he tells her an atrocious story about Aztecs, which puts a damper on the whole day.
He decides to leave to Long Island for a while, but eventually comes back because he wants to see her again.
It has been suggested that the story was influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem Eden Bower, the singer Mary Garden and also Pierre Louys's novel Aphrodite.
[2] Others have put forth that the dog Caesar may have been taken from Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman's short story A New England Nun.