Mrs. Goodwin was pleased. "You shall be my
companion," she said, "Your society will more than repay me. You must
not refuse. I set my heart upon it."

Milford was introduced, and the stately woman threw her searchlight upon
him. Here might be another genius.

"They tell me, Mr. Milford, that you are a man of great industry."

"They might have told you, madam, that I am a great fool."

Ha! a gleam of true light. She warmed toward him. She thought of Burns
plowing up a mouse. But she was skeptical of poets. They have a contempt
for their patrons if their wares do not sell.

"You credit them with too shrewd a discovery," she replied.

"I simply give them credit for ordinary eyesight, madam."

"You prove the contrary." She smiled upon him. "They tell me that you
came like a mist, out of the mysterious woods."

"A fog from the marsh," he replied, laughing; and the "peach" laughed,
too--more music from the North Sea. He saw the pink of her arm through
the gauze of her sleeve. Mrs. Goodwin thought that he knew nothing about
women, and she was right, but, as a rule, if rule can be applied, a
woman thinks this of a man when, indeed, he has mastered innocent
hearts to make wantons of them.

"Where is your field?" the discoverer inquired.

"Over yonder, where the sun is hottest."

"And your house?"

"Over on the hill, yonder, where the wind will blow coldest in winter."

Surely, he had a volume of verse hidden under the old clothes in his
trunk. She could have wished that he was even an inventor. She shuddered
at the thought of another attempt to set up a shaft to American letters.
The jovial doctor had shaken his fat sides at her. Suddenly she was
inspired with forethought. She asked him if he had ever written any
verse. He said that once he had been tempted to toss a firebrand into an
enemy's wheat-rick, but had never ruined a sheet with measured lines.
She saw that he had caught the spirit of the paragrapher's fling. So
this fear was put aside; still, he must be a genius of some sort--an
inventor, perhaps. She asked if he had ever invented anything, and he
answered, "Yes, a lie." This stimulated her interest in him. He was so
frank, so refreshing. She had heard that a laborer could be quaintly
entertaining. She contrasted him with the numerous men of her
acquaintance, men whose sentences were as dried herbs, the sap and the
fragrance gone. She was weary of the doctor's shop-talk, the
impoverished blood of convers