h as you would have would be unbearable."

"But sensible and wise."

"Happily our hearts need no teaching; they love and hate instinctively
before the brain can speak."

"Good--for some. But in me behold the anomaly whose brain always
reconnoitres the field beforehand, and has never yet considered it worth
while to signal either 'love' or 'hate.'"

He rose with a smile and sauntered over to the piano. The unbecoming
blush mounted slowly to Ruth's face and her eyes were bright as she
watched him. When his hands touched the keys, she spoke.

"No doubt you think it adds to your intellect to pretend independence
of all emotion. But, do you know, I think feeling, instead of being a
weakness, is often more clever than wisdom? At any rate, what you are
doing now is proof sufficient that you feel, and perhaps more strongly
than many."

He partly turned on the music-chair, and regarded her questioningly,
never, however, lifting his hands from the keys as he played a softly
passionate minor strain.

"What am I doing?" he asked.

"Making love to the piano."

"It does not hurt the piano, does it?"

"No; but never say you do not feel when you play like that."

"Is not that rather peremptory? Who taught you to read characters?"

"You."

"I? What a poor teacher I was to allow you to show such bungling work!
Will you sing?"

"No, I shall read; I have had quite enough of myself and of you for one
night."

"Alas, poor me!" he retorted mockingly, and seeming to accompany his
words with his music; "I am sorry for you, my child, that your emotions
are so troublesome. You have but made your entrance into the coldest,
most exciting arena,--the world. Remember what I tell you,--all the
strong motives, love and hate and jealousy, are mere flotsam and jetsam.
You are the only loser by their possession."

The quiet closing of the door was his only answer. Ruth had left the
room.

She knew Arnold too well to be affected by his little splurt of
cynicism. If she could escape a cynic either in books or in society,
she invariably did so. Life was still beautiful for her; and one of her
father's untaught lessons was that the cynic is a one-sided creature,
having lost the eye that sees the compensation balancing all things.
As long as Louis attacked things, it did no harm, except to incite
a friendly passage-at-arms; hence, most of such talk passed in the
speaking. Not so the disparaging insinuations he had cast at Dr. Kemp.

Du