d all the money in the world I would not be able to go
there because I have forgotten its name!" She laughed sobbingly, and
went on. "And he's been in Brazil. He lived for a time in Rio de
Janeiro." She stared fixedly at her mental image of the fateful house
where there was a broken statue on a bier, shook herself, and went on.
"And he's travelled in the forest. He's seen streams covered with the
big leaves of Victoria Regia like they have it in the Botanical Gardens,
and egrets standing on the bank, and better there than in ladies' hats.
I wonder if I would be a fool if I had the money?--if I would wear dead
things on my head? But indeed there are ways I think I would always be
nice, however rich I was--ways that don't affect me very much, so that
they're no sacrifice. And he's seen lots of things. Sloths, which I
always thought were just metaphors. And ant-eaters, and alligators, and
jaguars. And--"

"If you go to London," said Mr. Mactavish James, "you'll be losing your
heart to a keeper at the Zoo."

"Who's losing their heart to anybody?" she asked peevishly. "And you
needn't sneer. He's done lots else besides just seeing animals. Once he
steered a ship in the South Seas for two days and two nights when the
crew were down with the New Guinea fever. And another time he was
working at a mine in Andalusia. The miners went on strike. He and some
other men put up barricades and took guns. They defended the place. He
is the first man I have ever known who did such things. And they come
natural to him. He thinks no more of them than your son," she said
nastily, "thinks of playing a round on the Gullane links."

"Imphm. I wonder what he's been doing traiking about like this. Rolling
stones gather no moss, I've heard."

Her eyes blazed, then narrowed. "Oh, make no mistake! He earns a lot of
money. He can beat you even at your own game."

Mr. Mactavish James tee-heed, but did not like it, for she was looking
round the room as if it were a hated prison and all that was done in it
contemptible; and these things were his life. "Well, you know best. And
what's this paragon like? I've not seen the fellow."

"He's a lovely pairson," she said sullenly.

He began to loathe these two young people, who were all that he and his
stock could not be, who were going to do the things his age could not
do. "Ah, well! Ah, well!" he sighed, with a spurious shrewd melancholy.
"He'll be like me when he's old, Ellen; all old men are alike."