face?"

"What, playmate? You puzzle me."

"Grannie indulged Peter. Even in his eating, she couldn't refuse him
anything."

"But she loved you best!"

"No doubt of it. But he was well. He could have anything, even hunks of
cake. Grannie hates to deny pleasures to any living thing. 'I guess it
won't hurt you!' I've heard her say it to him over and over. But to
me--"

"To you?"

"Why, to me she never varied. 'Son,' she'd say, 'that isn't the way to
do. We can't risk it.' So I turned aside and ate good crusty bread and
drank milk. I didn't want cake. I didn't want Peter's coffee. But I
wonder how it would seem to have ridden them all bareback, all vices,
all indulgences, and conquered them after I'd known them--not turned
aside and gone the other way."

In that mood she hardly knew him. The clean, sweet, childlike quality
had gone; it had fled before this breath of the passion of life. She
felt vaguely how wrong he was. He was idealizing the world as he did not
know it and the conquest of the world as it appeared in her father, the
master of all its arts.

"Playmate," she said, though she was doubtful of her own wisdom.

"Yes, playmate."

"There isn't anything desirable in evil knowledge. I've heard him
say--you know--"

"Tom Fulton?"

"Yes. I've heard him say he wanted to know everything about life--bad
and good. He was black with knowledge. I might have learned it from him.
I thank God he spared me that. I wish you would be grateful for your
clean life. I wish you'd see there's no magic in the things my father
knows, for instance. It's better to make a lily grow."

"Ah, but I've discovered things in myself that are exactly like the
things in other men--and other men are used to them. So when an ugly
beast puts up its head, the man gives it a crack and knocks it silly.
Then it lies down a spell, and the man goes about his business. He gets
used to its growling and clawing away at intervals. He's only to knock
it down. But I don't fully know yet what is in that pit of mine. I
discovered something to-day."

"What?"

"The lust for fight."

She shuddered.

"I wasn't prepared for it. Another time I should be. It was an ugly
devil--but I loved it."

She was silent, and after a moment he asked her, in his old anxious,
friendly tone, "Have I hurt you?"

"No. But somehow it seems as if you'd gone away."

"I know. I'm still communing with that brute in me--the fighting brute.
I must be honest with you.