I went and comforted him. “Well, old man,” I said with a cheerful air, “how do you get on?”

“Robert,” said he, “do you suppose I would have come here if I had known what an atrocious humbug you are? Do you imagine for a moment that my relatives, if I had any, would have subjected my innocence to such insidious guardianship? Have you brought me here to destroy my faith, and pollute my morals, and poison my young life with the spectacle of your turpitude?”

“You’re improving already, Jim. When I saw you last you hadn’t any faith, nor much morals; your youth was away back in the past, and your strength was dried up like railroad doughnuts; you were ready to fall with the first leaves of autumn. Well, since you are here, you can stay till you see how you like us. What do you think of Clarice?”

“She has given me no basis on which to think of her, beyond her looks; they rather take one’s breath away. You beast, what do you mean by springing a face like that on me without warning, after all your humbugging talk last night, pretending to post me on every one I was to meet? And I say, do you always stand guard over her when anybody comes near?”

“Well, you see, you were so overcome by the first sight of her this morning, that it seemed no more than fair to let you recover your breath, as you say, and get used to her by degrees. But, James, this is unseemly levity on your part. What have we to do with girls? Let us leave them to the baser spirits who have use for them. The world’s a bubble, and the life of man of no account at all. We have tried it, and it is empty; hark, it sounds. Vain pomp and glory of it all, we hate ye. Ye tinsel gauds, ye base embroideries, ye female fripperies, have but our scorn. What are flashing eyes, and tossing ringlets, and rosy lips, and jewelled fingers, to minds like ours? Let us go off to the Nitrian desert, Jim, away from this eternal simper, this harrowing routine.”

“You must have been reading up lately, my boy. I left all that in the woods, Bob, and came down here in good faith for a change of air, prepared to learn anything you might have to teach me. If you’ve got any more traps and masked batteries, let them loose on me; practice on me to your heart’s content. You’ve undertaken to convert me, and I’m here to give you a chance: a fine old apostle you are. But I don’t quite understand Miss Elliston’s position here, Bob.”

“Her position here, or anywhere else, is that she does about as she pleases, and makes everybody else do it too, as you will see before your hair is gray, my learned friend. As I may have told you, we are her nearest relatives: she is an orphan.”

“Parents been dead long?”

“About seventeen years. What’s that got to do with it?”

“O, not much; don’t be so suspicious. Do you think I’m trying to play some trick on you, after your model? How should I, a helpless stranger in a strange land, betrayed by the friend in whom I trusted? I’m an orphan myself too. So that Miss Elliston is in a measure dependent on your kindness?”

“O, don’t fancy that she’s a poor relation, or anything of that sort. She’s got more cash than she wants, and loads of friends: had twenty invitations for the summer. If you don’t behave to suit her, she’s liable to go off any day to Bar Harbor, or Saratoga, or the Yosemite, or Kamtchatka.”

“Very good of her, to stay here with you, then.”

“Well, Mabel is deeply attached to her; so is Jane, and the children of course. Her parents and mine were close friends in the country where I came from, you know. She and I were brought up together; that is, she was I was mostly brought up before her appearance on this mundane sphere. We used to play in the haymow, and fall from the apple trees together, and all that. O, Clarice is quite a sister to me a pretty good sister too, all things considered.”

“And you are quite a brother to her, as I see. Strange, that it never occurred to mention her, when you were describing the various members of your family. Does her mind match her personal attractions?”

“She’s got as good a head as you have, old man, or any other male specimen I’ve struck. I myself meet her on almost equal terms. O, hang that; I don’t either. This is no subject for profane jesting. Talk about the inferiority of women! If the moralists and stump-speakers had one like her at home, they’d change their tune. But there are no more like her.”

“You speak warmly, Bob. To Clarice every virtue under heaven. Beautiful, brilliant, accomplished, amiable; you are a happy man to have such an annex to your household even if she wasn’t worth naming at the start.”

“Amiable who said she was amiable? Leave that to commonplace women and plain everyday fellows like me. You can’t expect that of her sort, Jim. She can be very nice when she pleases. I suppose she has a heart; it has never waked up yet. When it does, it will be a big one. We don’t expect the plebeian virtues of her.”

“She has a conscience, I hope? If not, it might be better to go away, and stay away. You ought not to keep dangerous compounds about the house, Bob.”

“She won’t explode though others may. A conscience? I think so. She couldn’t do a mean thing. She keeps a promise: she has more sense of justice than most women. But you can’t apply ordinary rules to her. She is of the blood royal: the Princess, we call her. Can’t you see, Jim? You are man enough to take her measure, so far as any one can.”

“I see her outside; it is worth coming here to see, if I were an artist or an aesthete. She has deigned to show me no more as yet.”

“It is all of a piece: the rest matches that, as you will see in time. There is but one Clarice.”

“Bob, you are different from last night. I believe you are telling the truth now.”

“She sobers you. When you have been with her, when you think of her, it is as if you were in church only a good deal more so.”

“Very convenient and edifying, to have such a private chapel in one’s house. Bob, in this mood I can trust you. Tell me one thing: why did you never mention her to me?”

“She doesn’t wish me to talk of her to strangers.”

“And now the prohibition is removed?”

“You are not a stranger now. She knows you, and you have seen her.”

“Well, you are loyal. Does she appreciate such fidelity?”

“We are very good friends. From childhood we have been more together than most brothers and sisters. More or less, I have always been to her as I am now. She is used to me. I do not ask too much of her. Don’t fancy that I am in her confidence, or any one: she has a royal reserve. See here, Jim; I am making you one of the family.”

“I understand. I must ask you one thing: why did you bring me here, to expose me to all this?”

“You needed a change, Jim, as you half owned just now; almost any change would be for the better. I wanted you to see the world again: there is in it nothing fairer or richer than Clarice.”

“You go on as if she were a saint; and yet you say she’s not.”

“You can answer that yourself, Jim. She’s far from it: you and I are not saint-worshippers. But she has it in her to be a saint, if her attention and her latent force were turned that way. She can be anything, or do anything. She hasn’t found her life yet. She bides her time, and I wait with her. Her wings will sprout some day. I like her well enough as she is.”

“Evidently. Do you know, old man, that you are talking very freely?”

“Am I the first? or do you suppose I would say all this to any chance comer? You opened your soul to me in May, as far as you knew it: you are welcome to see into mine now.”

“There is a difference. I cared for nothing, and believed in nothing; so my soul was worth little. Yours is that of a prosperous and happy man.”

“Externals are not the measure of the soul, Jim, nor yet creeds. I know a gentleman when I see him, and so do you. Your soul will get its food yet, and assume its full stature; you’ve been trying to starve it partly, that’s all.”

“Do you talk this way to your Princess, Bob?”

“No. She is younger than we: why should I bore her? You and I are on equal terms: she and I are not.”

“This humility is very chivalric, but I don’t quite understand it in you, Bob.”

“You can’t: you’ve been so long unused to women, and you never knew one like her. If you had, it would have been too early; what does a boy of twenty know of himself, or of the girls he thinks he is in love with, or of the true relations that should exist between him and them? Call it quixotic if you like; I don’t mind. Any gentleman, that is, any spiritual man, has it in him to be a Quixote. When you come to know Clarice, you will understand.”

“Do you call yourself and me spiritual men, Bob?”

“Yes; why not? Spirituality does not depend on the opinions one chances to hold, but on the view he takes of his own part in Life, and on the inherent nature of his soul. We are not worshippers of mammon, or fashion, or any of the idols of the tribe. I live in the world, and you out of it; but that makes little difference. You were in danger of becoming a dogmatist, but you are too much of a man for that. We both live to learn, and we can spend ourselves on an adequate object when we find it.”

“Bob, if you don’t talk to her like this, she doesn’t know you as I do.”

“No human being knows another exactly as a third does. We strike fire at different points when we do at all, which is seldom and show different sides of ourselves to such few as can see at all. She does not care especially for me: why should she? But she has great penetration more than you have, far more than I. She sees my follies and faults as you don’t; she is a sort of a confessor. At present she is a Sunday-school teacher, and I am her class.”

“What do you talk of, all the time?”

“It’s not all the time, by any means. That is as she pleases; just now it may be a good deal. By and by it may be your turn: then you’ll know some things you don’t now. There is nothing I say to her which the world might not overhear, if the world could understand it; and nothing that I can repeat. Jim, I am done: we are up very late.”

“Two things I must say yet, or ask, old man. You would stand by this girl against the world; and yet you have charged yourself with me. It may be idle to formulate remote and improbable contingencies, but it is in our line. Would you take her part against me, and be my enemy you who are my only friend?”

“I would stand by her against the world, assuredly. I would stand by you against all the world but her, I think. You two might quarrel, but neither of you would be wrong: I know you both, and you don’t know each other. So I take the risk; it is none. When that time comes, neither of you will find me wanting.”

“I believe it. The other thing is this forgive me if I go too far. Do you know what even intelligent and charitable people would say of all this? That it was very queer, very mixed, very dubious.”

“They are not our judges, nor we theirs. What would they say of your theories, and your way of life? To be sure, these concern yourself alone. So is this inwardly my affair; it binds, it holds no other. Must a man live in the woods, to form his own ethical code? Here too one may keep clean hands and a pure heart, and do his own thinking. Life is very queer, very mixed, very dubious; I take it as it comes. O, I see truth here and there in your notions of it, though it has done well by me. If I find in it something unique and precious, shall I thrust that aside, because the statutes have not provided for such a case? But one thing I can reject, so that for me it is not: the baser element. Gross selfishness and vulgar passions are no more in my scheme than in yours: if their suggestions were to rise, it would be easy to disown them. The human beasts who let their lower nature rule, the animals who care for themselves and call it caring for another, are not of our society. O yes, in common things one must get and keep his own the body must have its food; but one’s private temple is kept for worship, and owns a different law. It is not always, nor often, that one can build his shrine on earth, and enter it every day: when a man has that exceptional privilege, he must and may keep his standards high enough to fit. You understand?”

“I do: I am learning. I knew all this in theory, but supposed it ended there. And your Princess, you think is of our society?”

“No root of nobleness is lacking in her; when the season comes, the plants will spring and the garden bloom. But we cannot expect to understand her fully; she is of finer clay than we.”

“One thing more, and then I will let you go. There is more of you than I thought, my boy. In May I knew you had a heart; but one who heard you in the woods would have set you down just for a kindly, practical man of the world. Last night, and most of the time to-day, you were the trifler, the incorrigible jester. Why do you belie yourself so and hide your inmost self from all but me?”

“Because I’ve got to convert you, old man. It is a poor instrument that has but a single string; and David’s harp of solemn sound would bore me as much as it would other folks, if I tried to play on it all the time. How many people would sit out this talk of ours, or read it if we put it in print? Taken all in all, the light fantastic measure suits me much better. To see all sides, we must take all tones. The varying moods within fit the varying facts without; to get at truth we must give each its turn. But in the main it is best to take Life lightly. Your error was that you were too serious about it: it’s not worth that. Most things are chiefly fit to laugh at. The highgrand style will do once in a way: we’ve worked it too hard now. Let’s come down to earth. I wanted to show you that I could do the legitimate drama as well as you, and yet wear a tall hat and dress for dinner. See?”

“That’s all very well, Bob, but I can discriminate between your seriousness and your farce. Perhaps it is well to mix them, or to take them as they are mixed for us. You may be right in that; I’ll think it over. Yes, I can see now that Heraclitus overdoes it, and that I used to. Well, my lad, you are a queer professor of ethics; but I’m not sure you’ve brought me to the wrong school.”