well as to lay him up in bed? That incident had damaged two people at

least, the unknown vanquished combatant in his bodilywelfare, and me in
my character as an upstanding man in the fiercefeminineestimation of

Miss La Heu; but this injury it was my intention to set right; my
confession to the girl behind the counter was merely delayed. As I sat

with Shakespeare open in my lap, I added to my store of reasoning one
little new straw of argument in favor of my opinion that John Mayrant was

no longer at ease or happy about his love affair. I had never before met
any young man in whose manner nature was so finely tempered with good

bringing-up; forwardness and shyness were alike absent from him, and his
bearing had a sort of polished unconsciousness as far removed from raw

diffidence as it was from raw conceit; it was altogether a rare and
charming address in a youth of such true youthfulness, but it had failed

him upon two occasions which I have already mentioned. Both times that he
had come to the Exchange he had stumbled in his usually prompt speech,

lost his habitual ease, and betrayed, in short, all the signs of being
disconcerted. The matter seemed suddenly quite plain to me: it was the

nature of his errands to the Exchange. The first time he had been
ordering the cake for his own wedding, and to-day it was something about

the wedding again. Evidently the high mettle of his delicacy and breeding
made him painfullyconscious of the view which others must take of the

part that Miss Rieppe was playing in all this--a view from which it was
out of his power to shield her; and it was this consciousness that

destroyed his composure. From what I was soon to learn of his fine and
unmoved disregard for unfavorable opinion when he felt his course to be

the right one, I know that it was no thought at all of his own scarcely
heroic role during these days, but only the perception that outsiders

must detect in his affianced lady some of those very same qualities which
had chilled his too precipitatepassion for her, and left him alone,

without romance, without family sympathy, without social acclamations,
with nothing indeed save his high-strung notion of honor to help him

bravely face the wedding march. How appalling must the wedding march
sound to a waitingbridegroom who sees the bride, that he no longer

looks at except with distaste and estrangement, coming nearer and nearer
to him up the aisle! A funeral march would be gayer than that music, I

should think! The thought came to me to break out bluntly and say to him:
"Countermand the cake! She's only playing with you while that yachtsman

is making up his mind." But there could be but one outcome of such advice
to John Mayrant: two people, instead of one, would be in bed suffering

from contusions. As I mused on the boy and his attractive and appealing
character, I became more rejoiced than ever that he had thrashed

somebody, I cared not very much who nor yet very much why, so long as
such thrashing had been thorough, which seemed quite evidently and

happily the case. He stood now in my eyes, in some way that is too
obscure for me to be able to explain to you, saved from some reproach

whose subtletylikewise eludes my powers of analysis.
It was already five minutes after three o'clock, my dinner hour, when he

at length appeared in the Library; and possibly I put some reproach into
my greeting: "Won't you walk along with me to Mrs. Trevise's?" (That was

my boarding house.)
"I could not get away from the Custom House sooner," he explained; and

into his eyes there came for a moment that look of unrest and pre-
occupation which I had observed at times while we had discussed Newport

and alcoholic girls. The two subjects seemed certainly far enough apart!
But he immediately began upon a conversation briskly enough--so briskly

that I suspected at once he had got his subject ready in advance; he
didn't want me to speak first, lest I turn the talk into channels

embarrassing, such as bruised foreheads or wedding cake. Well, this
should not prevent me from dropping in his cup the wholesome bitters

which I had prepared.
"Well, sir! Well, sir!" such was his heartypreface. "I wonder if you're

feeling ashamed of yourself?"
"Never when I read Shakespeare," I answered restoring the plume to its

place.
He looked at the title. "Which one?"

"One of the unsuitable love affairs that was prevented in time."
"Romeo and Juliet?"

"No; Bottom and Titania--and Romeo and JuIiet were not prevented in time.
They had their bliss once and to the full, and died before they caused

each other anything but ecstasy. No weariness of routine, no tears of
disenchantment; complete love, completely realized--and finis!

It's the happiest ending of all the plays."
He looked at me hard. "Sometimes I believe you're ironic!

I smiled at him. "A sign of the highest civilization, then. But please to
think of Juliet after ten years of Romeo and his pin-headed intelligence

and his preordained infidelities. Do you imagine that her predecessor,
Rosamond, would have had no successors? Juliet would have been compelled

to divorce Romeo, if only for the children's sake.
"The children!" cried John Mayrant. "Why, it's for their sake deserted

women abstain from divorce!"
"Juliet would see deeper than such mothers. She could not have her little

sons and daughters grow up and comprehend their father's absences, and
see their mother's submission to his returns for such discovery would

scorch the marrow of any hearts they had."
At this, as we came out of the Library, he made an astonishing rejoinder,

and one which I cannot in the least account for: "South Carolina does not
allow divorce."

"Then I should think," I said to him, "that all you people here would be
doubly careful as to what manner of husbands and wives you chose for

yourselves."
Such a remark was sailing, you may say, almost within three points of the

wind; and his own accidentalallusion to Romeo had brought it about with
an aptness and a celerity which were better for my purpose than anything

I had privately developed from the text of Bottom and Titania; none the
less, however, did I intend to press into my service that fond couple

also as basis for a moral, in spite of the sharp turn which those last
words of mine now caused him at once to give to our conversation. His

quick reversion to the beginning of the talk seemed like a dodging of
remarks that hit too near home for him to relishhearing pursued.

"Well, sir," he resumed with the same initial briskness, "I was ashamed
if you were not."

"I still don't make out what impropriety we have jointly committed."
"What do you think of the views you expressed about our country?"

"Oh! When we sat on the gravestones."
"What do you think about it to-day?"

I turned to him as we slowly walked toward Worship Street. "Did you say
anything then that you would take back now?"

He pondered, wrinkling his forehead. "Well, but all the same, didn't we
give the present hour a pretty black eye?"

"The present hour deserves a black eye, and two of them!"
He surveyed me squarely. "I believe you're a pessimist!"

"That is the first trashy thing I've heard you say."
"Thank you! At least admit you're scarcely an optimist."

"Optimist! Pessimist! Why, you're talking just like a newspaper!"
He laughed. "Oh, don't compare a gentleman to a newspaper."

"Then keep your vocabulary clean of bargain-counter words. A while ago
the journalists had a furious run upon the adjective 'un-American.'

Anybody or anything that displeased them was 'un-American.' They ran it
into the ground, and in its place they have lately set up 'pessimist,'

which certainly has a threatening appearance. They don't know its
meaning, and in their mouths it merely signifies that what a man says

snakes them feel personallyuncomfortable. The word has become a dusty
rag of slang. The arrested burglar very likely calls the policeman a

pessimist; and, speaking reverently and with no intention to shock you,
the scribes and Pharisees would undoubtedly have called Christ a

pessimist when He called them hypocrites, had they been acquainted with
the word."

Once more my remarks drew from the boy an unexpected rejoinder. We had
turned into Worship Street, and, as we passed the churchyard, he stopped

and laid his hand upon the railing of the pate.
"You don't shock me," he said; and then: "But you would shock my aunts."

He paused, gazing into the churchyard, before he continued more slowly:
"And so should I--if they knew it--shock them."

"If they knew what?" I asked.
His hand indicated a sculptured crucifix near by.

"Do you believe everything still?" he answered. "Can you?"
As he looked at me, I suppose that he read negation in my eyes.

"No more can I," he murmured. Again he looked in among the tombstones and
flowers, where the old custodian saw us and took off his hat. "Howdy,