He said to Ethel afterwards, with wide eyes full of childlike wonder: “How queer! Do you know _she_ refused me? I’m—I’m afraid, you know, she’s somehow gone wrong, in spite of all your good opinions.” And Alitza, speaking of this remark, said, irate, to Daniel: “After all, it does seem as if it took a burial six feet under ground to get that stuff out of him and his like. Why can’t they take to decency as naturally as women do?” “Oh, all he needs is some real misery,” said Daniel. “Leave him to get it in his own way. He has dreamed of heaven and languished sentimentally in paradise, but his business is now to pull himself up out of sluggish uselessness to others. Turning away that money of yours into the public good, is a hint at something courageous.” “Anyway,” said Alitza, “Regie’s as truthful as a dumb brute, even when he is tossed about by his instincts. He told me, today that he had never had any feeling toward me but a brother’s anxiety and sense of responsibility, and that he knew all about the property matter from the nurse; and that he did hate his ‘old dad,’ and had a sort of hankering after revenge; and besides, felt it was too mean for the old man to be cheating me out of my money. And when the nurse said ‘there was enough for both, and for him to ask me to marry him,’ he thought it would be about the only way to fix things up easy all round. Yet that when it was done, and we quarreled all the way home from the minister’s, he felt sick of it. For he had no love for me like that. And the sight of his ‘old dad’s’ fury threw him into confusion and terror, and a sort of dumb sickness, just as he had seen in his mother many a time. So he said today, in his simple way, he was as glad as anything that I had pulled through life so splendidly; and was glad, in a way, that we didn’t in the least care for each other, and could be divorced all comfortably.”