on up courage to
talk to him; they were old friends.

One afternoon Quisante had been sitting with them on the lawn and, going
off to walk with Dick, left them alone together. Quisante had not been in
a happy vein; he had been trying to be light and flippant, and gossiping
about people; here, where good taste makes the whole difference between
what is acceptable and what is odious, was not the field for him.
Morewood had growled and May had flinched several times. She sat looking
after Quisante with troubled puzzled eyes.

"How funnily people are mixed!" she murmured, more to herself than her
companion. Then she turned to him and said with a laugh, "How you hate
him, don't you?"

"By all the nature of things you ought to hate him much more."

"Yes," she agreed. "But do you think that's the only way to look at
people, any more than it is at books? You like or dislike a novel,
perhaps; but you don't like or dislike--oh, what shall I say? Gibbon's
Roman Empire. There you admire or don't admire; or rather you study or
neglect; because, if you study, you must admire. Don't think me learned;
it's only an illustration."

"Gibbon's a duty," said Morewood, "but I'm not clear that Alexander
Quisante is."

"Oh, no; exactly the opposite; for me at least."

"Is he then a curriculum?"

"He's partly a curriculum, and partly--I don't know--a taste for strong
drink perhaps." She laughed reluctantly, adding, "I'm being absurd, I
know."

"In talk or in conduct?"

"Both, Mr. Morewood. I can only see him in metaphors. I once thought of
him as a mountain range; that's fine-sounding and dignified, isn't it?
But now I'm humbler in my fancies; I think of him as a forest--as the
bush, you know, full of wretched underwood that you keep tumbling over,
but with splendid trees (I don't know whether there are in the bush,
really) and every now and then a beautiful open space or a stately
vista."

"From all this riot of your fancy," said Morewood grimly, "one only thing
emerges quite plainly."

"Does even one thing?"

"Yes. That you think about Quisante a mighty lot."

"Oh, yes. Of course I do, a mighty lot," she admitted, laughing. "But you
aren't very much more useful than Mrs. Baxter, who told me that my
innocent heedlessness might give Mr. Quisante pain. I oughtn't to have
told you that, but it was rather funny. I'm sure she's said it to all the
Baxter girls in turn, and about all the girls that all the Baxter boys
were ever in