t a master, but a servant; its function is not to
direct, but to devise schemes and apologies to gratify impulses. It is
the ways and means committee to the great legislature of the body.

For several days after his fear that Peter Siner would marry Cissie
Dildine old Captain Renfrew was as felicitous as a lover newly
reconciled to his mistress. He ambled between the manor and the livery-
stable with an abiding sense of well-being. When he approached his home
in the radiance of high noon and saw the roof of the old mansion lying a
bluish gray in the shadows of the trees, it filled his heart with joy to
feel that it was not an old and empty house that awaited his coming, but
that in it worked a busy youth who would be glad to see him enter the
gate.

The fear of some unattended and undignified death which had beset the
old gentleman during the last eight or ten years of his life vanished
under Peter's presence. When he thought of it at all now, he always
previsioned himself being lifted in Peter's athletic arms and laid
properly on his big four-poster.

At times, when Peter sat working over the books in the library, the
Captain felt a prodigious urge to lay a hand on the young man's broad
and capable shoulder. But he never did. Again, the old lawyer would sit
for minutes at a time watching his secretary's regular features as the
brown man pursued his work with a trained intentness. The old gentleman
derived a deep pleasure from such long scrutinies. It pleased him to
imagine that, when he was young, he had possessed the same vigor, the
same masculinity, the same capacity for persistent labor. Indeed, all
old gentlemen are prone to choose the most personable and virile young
man they can find for themselves to have been like.

The two men had little to say to each other. Their thoughts beat to such
different tempos that any attempt at continued speech discovered unequal
measures. As a matter of fact, in all comfortable human conversation,
words are used as mere buoys dropped here and there to mark well-known
channels of thought and feeling. Similarity of mental topography is
necessary to mutual understanding. Between any two generations the
landscape is so changed as to be unrecognizable. Our fathers are
monarchists; our sons, bolsheviki.

Old Rose Hobbett was more of an age with the Captain, and these two
talked very comfortably as the old virago came and went with food at
meal-time. For instance, the Captain always