though in ardent recognition of his prowess among waves. With a
movement of his head he indicated his daughter--indicated that there was
no one like her in the whole world. I beamed agreement. Indeed, I did
think her rather nice. If one liked the father (and I liked Pethel all the
more in that capacity), one couldn't help liking the daughter, the two
were so absurdly alike. Whenever he was looking at her (and it was
seldom that he looked away from her), the effect, if you cared to be
fantastic, was that of a very vain man before a mirror. It might have
occurred to me that, if there was any mystery in him, I could solve it
through her. But, in point of fact, I had forgotten all about that possible
mystery. The amateur detective was lost in the sympathetic observer of a
father's love. That Pethel did love his daughter I have never doubted.
One passion is not less true because another predominates. No one who
ever saw that father with that daughter could doubt that he loved her
intensely. And this intensity gages for me the strength of what else was
in him.

Mrs. Pethel's love, though less explicit, was not less evidently
profound. But the maternal instinct is less attractive to an onlooker,
because he takes it more for granted than the paternal. What endeared
poor Mrs. Pethel to me was--well, the inevitability of the epithet I give
her. She seemed, poor thing, so essentially out of it; and by "it" is meant
the glowing mutual affinity of husband and child. Not that she didn't, in
her little way, assert herself during the meal. But she did so, I thought,
with the knowledge that she didn't count, and never would count. I
wondered how it was that she had, in that Cambridge bar-room long ago,
counted for Pethel to the extent of matrimony. But from any such room
she seemed so utterly remote that she might well be in all respects now
an utterly changed woman. She did preeminently look as if much
had by some means been taken out of her, with no compensatory process