he studied me with eyes that were so
quiet and kind I could feel a flutter of my heart-wings.

But still again I shook my head.

"That would be bringing you nothing but a withered up old has-been," I
said with a mock-wail of misery.

And Peter actually laughed at that.

"It'll be a good ten years before you've even grown up," he retorted.
"And another twenty years before you've really settled down!"

"You're saying I'll never have sense," I objected. "And I know you're
right."

"That's what I love about you," averred Peter.

"What you love about me?" I demanded.

"Yes," he said with his patient old smile, "your imperishable
youthfulness, your eternal never-ending eternity-defying golden-tinted
girlishness!"

A flute began to play in my heart. And I knew that like Ulysses's men
I would have to close my ears to it. But it's easier to row past an
island than to run away from your own heart.

"I know it's a lie, Peter, but I love you for saying it. It makes me
want to hug you, and it makes me want to pirouette, if I wasn't on
horseback. It makes my heart sing. But it's only the singing of one
lonely little chickadee in the middle of a terribly big pile of ruins.
For that's all my life can be now, just a hopeless smash-up. And
you're cut out for something better than a wrecking-car for the rest
of your days."

"No, no," protested Peter. "It's _you_ who've got to save _me_."

"Save you?" I echoed.

"You've got to give me something to live for, or I'll just rust away
in the ditch and never get back to the rails again."

"Peter!" I cried.

"What?" he asked.

"You're not playing fair. You're trying to make me pity you."

"Well, don't you?" demanded Peter.

"I would if I saw you sacrificing your life for a woman with a
crazy-quilt past."

"I'm not thinking of the past," asserted Peter, "I'm thinking of the
future."

"That's just it," I tried to explain. "I'll have to face that future
with a clouded name. I'll be a divorced woman. Ugh! I always thought
of divorced women as something you wouldn't quite care to sit next to
at table. I hate divorce."

"I'm a Quaker myself," acknowledged Peter. "But I occasionally think
of what Cobbett once said: 'I don't much like weasels. Yet I hate
rats. Therefore I say success to the weasels!'"

"I don't see what weasels have to do with it," I complained.

"Putting one's house in order again may sometimes be as beneficent as
surgery," contended Peter.

"And someti