a little higher than the
other--"Jarback" Temple he had been called in school, and the name
still clung to him. To be sure, he had very fine grey eyes, but their
dreamy brilliance gave his dull face an uncanny look which girls did
not like, and so made matters rather worse than better. Of course
looks didn't matter so much in the case of a man; Steve Millar was
homely enough, and all marked up with smallpox to boot, yet he had got
for wife the prettiest and smartest girl in South Bay. But Steve was
rich. Roger was poor and always would be. He worked his stony little
farm, from which his father and grandfather had wrested a fair living,
after a fashion, but Nature had not cut him out for a successful
farmer. He hadn't the strength for it and his heart wasn't in it. He'd
rather be hanging over a book. Catherine secretly thought Roger's
matrimonial chances very poor, but it would not do to discourage the
b'y. What he needed was spurring on.

"Ye'll git someone if ye don't fly too high," she announced loudly and
cheerfully. "Thar's always a gal or two here and thar that's glad to
marry for a home. 'Tain't no use for _you_ to be settin' your thoughts
on anyone young and pretty. Ye wouldn't git her and ye'd be worse off
if ye did. Your grandfather married for looks, and a nice useless wife
he got--sick half her time. Git a good strong girl that ain't afraid
of work, that'll hold things together when ye're reading
po'try--that's as much as you kin expect. And the sooner the better.
I'm done--last winter's rheumatiz has about finished _me_. An' we
can't afford hired help."

Roger felt as if his raw, quivering soul were being seared. He looked
at his aunt curiously--at her broad, flat face with the mole on the
end of her dumpy nose, the bristling hairs on her chin, the wrinkled
yellow neck, the pale, protruding eyes, the coarse, good-humoured
mouth. She was so extremely ugly--and he had seen her across the table
all his life. For twenty-five years he had looked at her so. Must he
continue to go on looking at ugliness in the shape of a wife all the
rest of his life--he, who worshipped beauty in everything?

"Did my mother look like you, Aunt Catherine?" he asked abruptly.

His aunt stared--and snorted. Her snort was meant to express kindly
amusement, but it sounded like derision and contempt.

"Yer ma wasn't so humly as me," she said cheerfully, "but she wan't no
beauty either. None of the Temples was ever better lookin' tha