"David," said the major as he laid aside the book he had been buried in
and began to polish his glasses, "you make no allowances whatever for the
artistic temperament. When a man is making connection with his solar
plexus he doesn't consider the consumption of food of paramount
importance. Now in this treatise of Aristotle--"

"Well, anyway, I've made up my mind to fix up something between him and
Caroline Darrah. He's got to get a heart interest of his own and let
mine alone. The child is daffy about his poetry and moons at him all the
time out of the corners of her eyes, dandy eyes at that; but the old
ink-swiller acts as if she wasn't there at all. What'll I do to make him
just see her? Just see her--_see her_--that'll be enough!"

"David," said the major quietly as he looked into the fire with his
shaggy brows bent over his keen eyes, "the combination of a man heart and
a woman heart makes a dangerous explosive at the best, but here are
things that make it fatal. The one you are planning would be deadly."

"Why, why in the world shouldn't I touch them off? Perfectly nice girl,
all right man and--"

"Boy, have you forgotten that I told you of the night Andrew Sevier's
father killed himself; yes, that he had sat the night through at the
poker table with Peters Brown? Brown offered some restoration compromise
to the widow but she refused--you know the struggle that she made and
that it killed her. We both know the grit it took for Andrew to chisel
himself into what he is. The first afternoon he met the girl in here,
right by this table, for an instant I was frightened--only _she_ didn't
know, thank God! The Almighty gardens His women-things well and fends off