and lazy, like the rest of them," he said cynically. Having
passed the age when he cared to sport with Amaryllis, he did not,
he said, like women. When he was quite a young man, he had added,
"except Mrs. Maitland." Which remark, being repeated to Molly
Wharton, had moved that young lady to retort that the reason that
Sarah Maitland was the only woman he liked, was that Sarah
Maitland was not a woman! "The only feminine thing about her is
her petticoats," said Miss Wharton, daintily. For which
_mot_, Robert Ferguson never forgave her. He certainly did
not expect to like this new-comer in Mercer, this Mrs. Richie,
but he had gone to see her. He had been obliged to, because she
wished to rent a house he owned next door to the one in which he
lived. So, being her landlord, he had to see her, if for nothing
else, to discourage requests for inside repairs. He saw her, and
promised to put up a little glass house at the end of the back
parlor for a plant-room. "If she'd asked me for a
'conservatory,'" he said to himself, "I wouldn't have considered
it for a moment; but just a few sashes--I suppose I might as well
give in on that? Besides, if she likes flowers, there must be
something to her." All the same, he was conscious of having given
in, and to a woman who wore rings; so he was quite gruff with
Mrs. Richie's little boy, whom he found listening to an harangue
from Elizabeth. The two children had scraped acquaintance through
the iron fence that separated the piazzas of the two houses. "I,"
Elizabeth had announced, "have a mosquito-bite on my leg; I'll
show it to you," she said, generously; and when the bite on her
little thigh was displayed, she tried to think of other personal
matters. "My mother's dead. And my father's dead."

"So's mine," David matched her, proudly. "I'm an adopted child."