s, if you ask me."

"He is a very fine boy. I always liked him myself and James adores
him. If I had two or three daughters, I'd be willing to let one of
them marry Laurence--after awhile. But having only one I must say I
want her to do better."

"I see," said my mother. To me she said later:

"And yet, Armand, although I condemn it, I can quite appreciate Mrs.
Eustis's point of view. I was somewhat like that myself, once upon a
time."

"You? Never!"

My mother smiled tolerantly.

"Ah, but you never offered me a daughter-in-law I did not relish. It
was much easier for me to bear the Church!"

That night I went over to John Flint's, for I thought that the fact
of Mary Virginia's deliberately choosing to act as she had done would
in a measure settle the matter and relieve his anxiety.

There was a cedar wood fire before which Kerry lay stretched; little
white Pitache, grown a bit stiff of late, occupied a chair he had
taken over for his own use and from which he refused to be dislodged.
Major Cartwright had just left, and the room still smelt of his cigar,
mingling pleasantly with the clean smell of the burning cedar.

On the table, within reach of his hand, was ranged the Butterfly Man's
entire secular library: Andrew Lang's translation of Homer; Omar;
Richard Burton's Kasidah; Saadi's Gulistan, over which he chuckled;
Robert Burns; Don Quixote; Joan of Arc, and Huckleberry Finn; Treasure
Island; the Bible Miss Sally Ruth had given him--I never could induce
him to change it for my own Douai version--; one or two volumes of
Shakespeare; the black Obituary Book, grown loathsomely fat; and the
"Purely Original Verse of James Gordon Coogler," which a light-minded
professor of mathematics at the University of South Carolina had given
him, and in which he evilly delighted. Other books came and went, but
these remained. To-night it was the Bible which lay open, at the Book
of Psalms.

"Look at this." He laid his finger on a verse of the nineteenth: "The
testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple."

"The times I've turned that over in my mind, out in the woods by night
and the fields by day!" said the Butterfly Man, musingly. "The simple
is _me_, parson, and the testimony is green things growing, and
butterflies and moths, and Kerry, and people, and trouble, and
Louisa's hair, and--well, about everything, I reckon.

"Yes, everything's testimony, and it can make wise the simple--if he's
not too simple.