ad
shown an honest interest in her. "I take her to the theatre regularly,"
said Drislane. "I would to-night, only I want to sit in somewhere and
have a long talk with her. You'd be surprised the things she doesn't
know about the world."

"I wonder," I thought to myself, "if you realize the things _you_ don't
know about the world," and began to wish then for his own sake that he'd
hurry up and take to looking at life through the same glasses other
people used.

She was living in sordid quarters in a section where a woman was any
man's who could get her, and on any terms he could get her; and she was
of the type and at the age which has always been held most desirable by
the primitive male; and it was to be doubted if she had had the
religious or home training needful to an emotional nature. In a good
home, in a community where a woman was respected because she was a
woman, all would have been fine; but here--they married, and he most of
the time at sea--I felt sorry for her as well as for him.

"Take her out of here when you marry," I said to him before parting.

He shook his head. "No, I had a scrap with my people leaving home.
They're all right at home--the best--but they want me to get down on my
knees to them."

"Better be on your knees of your own will to your own people than
against your will to an enemy," I said, but it had no meaning to him;
and I left him to his Rose, almost wishing that something would happen
to him soon to shake him up, even if, shaking him up, it shook off a
few of the purple blossoms that he thought so necessary to the tree of
life. Thinking of him I almost talk like him in his absent-minded
moments.

III

I left Drislane to go to the theatre with Captain Norman Sickles. The
theatre over, he went with me to my hotel to get a few ship's papers I
had for him. After that we sat in for a smoke and a chat.

Not that there was much chatting on Captain Norman's part. He never did
have much to say of himself, nor too much of anybody else, though he
could praise a man if he liked him. It was the first time I had ever
spent more than an hour together with him except on pure business, and I
was curious to know just what he thought of a lot of things; among
others, of his cousin. I gave him two or three openings, but he didn't
rush in. What he did have to say of him he said at one gulp. It was:
"Where I was raised 'twas common talk that after you'd been getting
naught but fair winds for a l