admiration of
many and the true love of the few, which is all any man may hope for
and more than most attain. Outside of that, a gray moth, and a
butterfly's wing, and a torn nest, and a child's curl, and a ragdoll
in her grave; and now a girl's kiss on the palm and a tear to hallow
it. But I who had greatly loved and even more greatly lost and
suffered, was it not for me of all men to know and to understand?

"But I have got the thing itself," said the Butterfly Man, "that makes
everything else worth while. Why, I have been taught how to love! My
work is big--but by itself it wasn't enough for me. I needed something
more. So I was swept and empty and ready and waiting--when she came.
Now hadn't there got to be something fine and decent in me, when it
was she alone out of all the world I was waiting for and could love?"

"Yes, yes. But oh, my son, my son!"

"Oh, it was bad and bitter enough at first, parson. Because I wanted
her so much! Great God, I was like a soul in hell! After awhile I
crawled out of hell--on my hands and knees. But I'd begun to
understand things. I'd been taught. It'd been burnt into me past
forgetting. Maybe that's what hell is for, if folks only knew it.
Could anything ever happen to anybody any more that I couldn't
understand and be sorry for, I wonder?

"No, don't you worry any about me. I wouldn't change places with
anybody alive, I'm too glad for everything that's ever happened to me,
good and bad. I'm not ashamed of the beginning, no, nor I'm not afraid
of the end.

"Will you believe me, though, when I tell you what worried me like the
mischief for awhile? Family, parson! You can't live in South Carolina
without having the seven-years' Family-itch wished on you, you know. I
felt like a mushroom standing up on my one leg all by myself among a
lot of proper garden plants--until I got fed up on the professional
Descendant banking on his boneyard full of dead ones; then I quit
worrying. I'm Me and alive--and I should worry about ancestors! Come
to think about it, everybody's an ancestor while you wait. I made up
my mind I'd be my own ancestor and my own descendant--and make a good
job of both while I was at it."

But I was too sad to smile. And after awhile he asked gently:

"Are you grieving because you think I've lost love? Parson, did you
ever know something you didn't know how you knew, but you know you
know it because it's true? Well then--I know that girl's mine and I
came here to