heard this with fine interest, but no quickening. Cairns was insatiable
for details of a life that had been spent in Asia and upon ships of the
Eastern seas. Everything that Bedient said had a shining exterior of
mystery to the American. His vague memories of New York; the
water-fronts that had since called his steps; different ships and
captains; the men about him, Healy and the packers; his entire
detachment from relatives, and his easy familiarity with the great
unhasting years--all these formed into a luminous envelope, containing
the new friend.

"I was always fed somehow," Bedient whispered, as he told about the dim
little lad that was himself. "There was always some one good to me. I
'member one old sailor with rings in his ears----"

The David Cairns of twenty likewise gave all gladly. Queerly enough, he
found the other especially fascinated in anything he told of his mother
and sisters, and the life at home in New York, made easy by the
infinite little cushions of wealth and culture. A youth eight months
away on his first campaign can talk with power on these matters.
Here Cairns was wonderful and authoritative and elect to
Bedient--particularly in the possession of a living, breathing Mother.
This filled the cup of dreams in a way that the dominant exterior
matters of the young correspondent's mind--newspaper beats, New York
honors, great war stories, and a writer's name--could never have done.
Bedient was clearly an inveterate idealist. His dreams were strangely
lustrous, but distant, not to be touched nor handled--an impersonal
kind of dreaming. Cairns was not so astonished that the other had been
of uncommon quality in the beginning, but that his life had not _made_
him common was a miracle, no less.