nd the little noiseless
breeze rustling the white irises, and bearing hither and thither the
soft perfume of the roses. His boy face, lean, high-strung, brooding,
was full of suppressed contentions. I made myself, during our silence,
state his possible problem: "He doesn't love her any more, he won't
admit this to himself; he intends to go through with it, and he's
catching at any justification of what he has seen in her that has
chilled him, so that he may, poor wretch! coax back his lost illusion."
Well, if that was it, what in the world could I, or anybody, do about
it?

His next remark was transparent enough. "Do you approve of young ladies
smoking?"

I met his question with another: "What reasons can be urged against it?"

He was quick. "Then you don't mind it?" There was actual hope in the way
he rushed at this.

I laughed. "I didn't say I didn't mind it." (As a matter of fact I do
mind it; but it seemed best not to say so to him.)

He fell off again. "I certainly saw very nice people doing it up there."

I filled this out. "You'll see very nice people doing it everywhere."

"Not in Kings Port! At least, not my sort of people!" He stiffly
proclaimed this.

I tried to draw him out. "But is there, after all, any valid objection
to it?"

But he was off on a preceding speculation. "A mother or any parent," he
said, "might encourage the daughter to smoke, too. And the girl might
take it up so as not to be thought peculiar where she was, and then she
might drop it very gladly."

I became specific. "Drop it, you mean, when she came to a place where
doing it would be thought--well, in bad style?"

"Or for the better reason," he answered, "that she didn't really like it
herself."

"How much you don't 'really like it' yourself!" I remarked.

This time he was slow. "Well--well--why need they? Are not their lips
more innocent than ours? Is not the association somewhat--?"

"My dear fellow," I interrupted, "the association is, I think you'll
have to agree, scarcely of my making!"

"That's true enough," he laughed. "And, as you say, very nice people
do it everywhere. But not here. Have you ever noticed," he now inquired
with continued transparency, "how much harder they are on each other
than we are on them?"

"Oh, yes! I've noticed that." I surmised it was this sort of thing
he had earlier choked himself off from telling me in his unfinished
complaint about his aunt; but I was to learn later that on this o