done; meanwhile all
was well and good. After a little, his wife was content to leave us
alone together, and we drifted to Johnny's "den"--a word new at that
time, and descriptive of the only feature of his home on which he laid
the slightest self-conscious emphasis.

I had heard that there were twins--boys; and soon, as the evening was
still young, I heard the twins themselves. They had reached the age of
ten months, and consequently had developed wants, but no articulate
means for making those wants known. Therefore they howled, and they
began howling in unison now. Perhaps it was for them that a foresighted
mother had left us alone together.

"Great little hollerers!" said Johnny placidly, pulling at his pipe.

I was still a bachelor. "Might shut the door?" I proposed.

"If you like," said Johnny, without enthusiasm. "They wake me every
morning at five," he added.

Yes, I was still a bachelor--and probably a tactless, even a brutal,
one.

"Might move them to another bedroom, farther away?" I suggested. The
house seemed big enough for such an arrangement.

"Don't want to," declared Johnny. He began pulling at his pipe again,
and there was a little silence during which I might meditate on the curt
nobility of his remark.

The fact was, of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with
gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its advances; no
dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which
he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar
merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic
environment. "If Adele stands it, I will too--they're mine as well as
hers,"--such I conceive to have been his attitude. Johnny had no nerves,
and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves broke on his
sensorium as ripples break on a granite coast. Perhaps they pleased him;
perhaps they even soothed him. Why, bless you! these children were
_his_! They were facts as great and as unescapable as the ebb and flow
of the tides, as dawn and twilight, as the morning and evening stars.
And the evening stars were singing together. Great may have been the
jubilation for Johnny's ears, boundless the content in Johnny's heart.

I really think that Johnny felt through the din some of the exhilaration
that often came to him with a good brisk scrap in his office--or in the
other man's office. In fact, home and business were Johnny's two sources
of interest and pleasure--t