to look out of the window.

"I'm glad you like it," she replied joyously. "We think it's nice, but
this place is so old."

"I love it for that," he cried appreciatively. "Those bushes are so
nice--those roses. Oh, dear, you don't know how sweet it all seems--and
you--you are so nice."

He held her off at arm's length and surveyed her while she blushed
becomingly. His eager, direct, vigorous onslaught confused her at
times--caused her pulse to beat at a high rate.

They went out into the dooryard after a time and then Marietta appeared
again, and with her Mrs. Blue, a comfortable, round bodied mother of
sixty, who greeted Eugene cordially. He could feel in her what he felt
in his own mother--in every good mother--love of order and peace, love
of the well being of her children, love of public respect and private
honor and morality. All these things Eugene heartily respected in
others. He was glad to see them, believed they had a place in society,
but was uncertain whether they bore any fixed or important relationship
to him. He was always thinking in his private conscience that life was
somehow bigger and subtler and darker than any given theory or order of
living. It might well be worth while for a man or woman to be honest and
moral within a given condition or quality of society, but it did not
matter at all in the ultimate substance and composition of the universe.
Any form or order of society which hoped to endure must have individuals
like Mrs. Blue, who would conform to the highest standards and theories
of that society, and when found they were admirable, but they meant
nothing in the shifting, subtle forces of nature. They were just
accidental harmonies blossoming out of something which meant everything
here to this order, nothing to the universe at large. At twenty-two
years of age he was thinking these things, wondering whether it would be
possible ever to express them; wondering what people would think of him
if they actually knew what he did think; wondering if there was
anything, anything, which was really stable--a rock to cling to--and not
mere shifting shadow and unreality.

Mrs. Blue looked at her daughter's young lover with a kindly eye. She
had heard a great deal about him. Having raised her children to be
honest, moral and truthful she trusted them to associate only with those
who were equally so. She assumed that Eugene was such a man, and his
frank open countenance and smiling eyes and mouth co