good world--I've always found it to be a good world, and if I've ever
heard anything against it, I've refused to believe it," his look seemed
to say.

All through breakfast he rambled on after his amiable habit--praising
the food, praising the flowers, praising the country, praising
the universe. The only creature or object he omitted to praise was
Kesiah--for in his heart he regarded it as an outrage on the part of
Providence that a woman should have been created quite so ugly. While
he talked he kept his eyes turned away from her, gazing abstractedly
through the window or at a portrait of Mrs. Gay, painted in the first
year of her marriage, which hung over the sideboard. In the mental world
which he inhabited all women were fair and fragile and endowed with
a quality which he was accustomed to describe as "solace." When
occasionally, as in the case of Kesiah, one was thrust upon his
notice, to whom by no stretch of the imagination these graces could be
attributed, he disposed of the situation by the simple device of gazing
above her head. In his long and intimate acquaintance, he had never
looked Kesiah in the face, and he never intended to. He was perfectly
aware that if he were for an instant to forget himself so far as to
contemplate her features, he should immediately lose all patience with
her. No woman, he felt, had the right to affront so openly a man's ideal
of what the sex should be. When he spoke of her behind her back it was
with indignant sympathy as "poor Miss Kesiah," or "that poor good soul
Kesiah Blount"--for in spite of a natural bent for logic, and more than
forty years of sedulous attendance upon the law, he harboured at the
bottom of his heart an unreasonable conviction that Kesiah's plainness
was, somehow, the result of her not having chosen to be pretty.

"Any sport, Jonathan?" he inquired cheerfully, while he buttered his