was making fun of her;
but she liked to hear him talk like that. It was so new to her.

"Ha! her complexion reminds me of a tinted vase with the light seeping
through it," said the Professor, talking to the "discoverer," but with
his eyes fixed upon the Norwegian girl. "A flower come up out of the
wild and long-neglected garden of the Viking. And how truly American
those people soon become! Blood, madam; it is blood."

"Gunhild is a good girl, and knows nothing so well as she does honor."

"A girl who knows honor is splendidly equipped, madam. I have a
daughter. And who is it that accompanies her? It is honor, madam.
Throughout the seasons, they are together, arm about waist, like school
girls, studying virtue from the same book."

She leaned over and touched his arm. "I want to ask you something. Do
you know very much about Mr. Milford?"

"He warmed his hand with his heart, madam, and extended it to me."

"But don't you think he's peculiar?"

"All things are peculiar until we understand them."

"I know, but isn't there something strange about his being here as he
is, working on a farm?"

"Not to me, when I meditate upon the fact that I myself keep books and
do general roust-about work for a planing mill. Roust-about--idiomatic,
good, and to the point."

"But farm work is so hard," she persisted. "And he appears to be so well
equipped for something better. At times, he is almost brilliant."

"A brightness in the rough," said the Professor. "He has that crude
quality of force which sometimes puts to shame the more nearly even
puissance of a systematic training."

She looked at him as if her eyes said, "Charming." And the world had
suffered him to go to seed, nodding his ripe and bursting pod in the
empty air. It was a shame. But his treatise on philosophy--she must
find out about that.

"Professor, have you ever written anything?"

He smiled. "Madam, the web I have woven, if spun straight, would
encircle the globe. I have written."

"Philosophy?"

"Finance, madam."

She choked a laugh in its infant uprising. That this threadbare man
should write about money! How ridiculous! But true genius has many a
curious kink.

Mrs. Blakemore, feeling that she was neglected, brought in Bobbie to
annoy the company with him. She bade him shake hands with Mr. Milford;
she commanded him to recite for the Professor. The learned man smiled.
He said that there was nothing so sweet as the infant lip, lisping its
way i