mantel with the cloisonne vase, it wanted something....

As I was gathering the rowen crop of after-enjoyment which rewards us
when we reflect freshly upon our adventures, whom should I meet but
Richard Starkweather himself in his battered machine. The two boys, one
of whom was driving, and the little girl, were with him.

"How are you, David?" he called out. "Whoa, there! Draw up, Jamie."

We looked at each other for a moment with that quizzical, half-humorous
look that so often conveys, better than any spoken words, the
sympathetic greeting of friends. I like Richard Starkweather.

He had come up from the city looking rather worn, for the weather had
been trying. He has blue, honest, direct-gazing eyes with small humour
wrinkles at the corners. I never knew a man with fewer theories, or with
a simpler devotion to the thing at hand, whatever it may be. At
everything else he smiles, not cynically, for he is too modest in his
regard for his own knowledge; he smiles at everything else because it
doesn't seem quite real to him.

"Been up to see Mary's new house?" he asked.

"Yes," And for the life of me I couldn't help smiling in response.

"It's a wonder isn't it?"

He thought his wife a very extraordinary woman. I remember his saying to
me once, "David, she's got the soul of a poet and the brain of a
general."