presents a kind of superindividual recognition?--a
sudden wakening of that inherited composite memory which is more
commonly called passional affinity.'--I have a notion that that may mean
something or other, Piney?"

"Don't ast me."

The reader began again: "'Certainly if first love be evolutionally
explicable, it means the perception by the lover of something
differentiating the beloved from all other women,--something
corresponding to an inherited ideal within himself, previously latent,
but suddenly lighted and defined,'--an inherited ideal--something
differentiating the beloved from all other women," murmured the reader
earnestly. He put the book back upon his stomach, and there was a long
silence in the woods, broken by a distant reverberation, short, sharp,
suggestive. Piney jumped, like the highly strung, alert young animal
that he was.

"Whut wuz it, Mist' Steerin'?"

"Uncle Bernique's blasts, Piney. He's on the trail." The silence
remained unbroken for another long period.

"Mist' Steerin'," began Piney at last; he had a long spear of sere grass
in his mouth and he chewed at it argumentatively, "d'you think,--I
couldn't adzackly tell whut that writin' wuz a-aimin' at, but simlike
f'm the way it goes on that ef the sort of thing it makes aout to happen
happens onst, it oughtn't never to happen agin, hmh?" Piney's long drawn
notes of rising inflection were musical. "Simlike, ef a man onst finds
the right woman they oughtn't never to be no more right women, hmh?"

"There ought not to be, Piney, son."

"Well, but they gen'ly is, hmh?" Bruce straightened out one foot with an
impatient kick. Ever since they had fallen into the habit of abstracted
talks on this imponderable subject, Piney had seemed able, with a sort
of elfin craft, to make Bruce remember Miss Elsie Gossamer's light,
fleeting touch upon his life. He had never mentioned Miss Gossamer to
Piney in all their mutual experience, yet the tramp-boy was constantly
skirmishing up from afar with a generalisation, like a high-held
transparency, that illuminated Miss Gossamer's memory for Bruce. Three
hypotheses had presented to Bruce in the way of explanation: one, that
he himself was possessed by a little embarrassed consciousness that he
should have had any past at all in view of the present; another, that
Miss Sally Madeira had just possibly set Piney on to worry him about
Miss Gossamer; and the last, that Piney, divining that a man could
hardly reac