e answered.

"I should say so. Whom do you want me to talk to now?--Oh, say, bring me
up against that cashier-fellow."

Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could Ruth have wished
better behavior on her lover's part. Not once did his eyes flash nor his
cheeks flush, while the calmness and poise with which he talked surprised
her. But in Martin's estimation the whole tribe of bank cashiers fell a
few hundred per cent, and for the rest of the evening he labored under
the impression that bank cashiers and talkers of platitudes were
synonymous phrases. The army officer he found good-natured and simple, a
healthy, wholesome young fellow, content to occupy the place in life into
which birth and luck had flung him. On learning that he had completed
two years in the university, Martin was puzzled to know where he had
stored it away. Nevertheless Martin liked him better than the
platitudinous bank cashier.

"I really don't object to platitudes," he told Ruth later; "but what
worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent, superior
certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken to do it. Why,
I could give that man the whole history of the Reformation in the time he
took to tell me that the Union-Labor Party had fused with the Democrats.
Do you know, he skins his words as a professional poker-player skins the
cards that are dealt out to him. Some day I'll show you what I mean."

"I'm sorry you don't like him," was her reply. "He's a favorite of Mr.
Butler's. Mr. Butler says he is safe and honest--calls him the Rock,
Peter, and says that upon him any banking institution can well be built."

"I don't doubt it--from the little I saw of him and the less I heard from
him; but I don't think so much of banks as I did. You don't mind my
speaking my mind this way, dear?"

"No, no; it is most interesting."

"Yes," Martin went on heartily, "I'm no more than a barbarian getting my
first impressions of civilization. Such impressions must be
entertainingly novel to the civilized person."

"What did you think of my cousins?" Ruth queried.

"I liked them better than the other women. There's plenty of fun in them
along with paucity of pretence."

"Then you did like the other women?"

He shook his head.

"That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological poll-parrot.
I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like Tomlinson, there
would be found in her not one origina