I should find _you_ transfigured and idealized and
grown up."

"It is the suggestion of me that intrigues you?"

"I suppose it is--in a subtle way!" He glanced up, to accentuate his
words, but surprise seized him at sight of the boy's white, passionate
face. "Why, Max, boy! What's the matter?"

Max made a quick gesture, sweeping the words aside. "I am not sufficient
to you?"

Blake stared. "I don't understand."

"Yet I speak your own tongue! I say 'I am not sufficient to you?' I have
given you my friendship--my heart and my mind, but I am not sufficient
to you? Something more is required--something else--something
different!"

"Something more? Something different?"

"Yes! In this world it is always the outward seeming! I may have as much
personality as my sister Maxine; I may be as interesting, but you do not
inquire. Why? Why? Because I am a boy--she a woman!"

Blake, uncertain how to answer this cataract of words, took refuge in
banter.

"Don't be fantastical!" he said. "We are not holding a debate on sex. If
we are to be normal, we must declare that man and woman don't compare!"

"Now you are gambling with words! I desire facts. It is a fact that
until to-day I was enough--friend enough--companion enough--"

"My child!"

But Max rushed on, lashing himself to rage.

"I was enough; but now you desire more. And why? Why? Not because you
discern more in the new personality, but because it appeals to you as
the personality of a woman. There is nothing deeper--nothing more in the
affair--no other reason, as you yourself would say, upon God's earth!"
He ended abruptly; his arms fell to his sides; his voice held in it a
sound perilously like a sob.

Blake looked at him in surprise.

"My good boy," he said, "you're forgetting the terms of our friendship;
to my knowledge they never included hysterics."

The tonic effect of the words was supreme; the sob was strangled in
Max's throat; a swift, pained certainty came to him that Blake would not
have spoken these words in the plantation that morning, would not have
spoken them as they raced together up the Escalier de Sainte-Marie.

"I understand, _mon ami_!" he said, tensely. "I understand so perfectly
that, were you dying, and were this request your last, I would refuse
it! I hope I have explained myself!"

The tone was bitter and contemptuous, it succeeded in stinging Blake. Up
to that moment he had played with the affair; now the play became
earnest, h