“Is that man your friend?” she said sharply. “I understand not all your speaking words, but full well I know your wisdom in the thought of it, and well I know that the body is as a beast if the spirit shall not command what it will do. He thinks me a fool—too much fool to talk your wisdom-words. I are not fool. I choose this day. This head shall say, ‘No more of beer and oder tings to my body. It has said so before this time, many days, but now, _the body must_!’ Now then, I, Bertha, ask you: Do you think I am a fool?” “No,” said Ethelbert. “Well, I shall be a fool if I steals away my brains some more.” “I think you will never do that any more. Brain force can be lost and wasted; or it can be treasured up, englobed delightsomely. Now, Bertha, take this rosebud and try to live as healthfully and sweet as roses do. Bertha, gather up your grass for the rabbits, and make the little things clean and happy, and then you can read your papers tonight, and come and get some more. Here is a pencil, so you can mark any little place you don’t quite understand, and I will tell you about it. Good-night.” “Good-night, Miss Daksha,” said Bertha, looking back enviously at Reginald, who stood striking the rosebush with his cane, and not yet dismissed. “You can’t put that rose together again,” said Ethelbert. “Who cares?” said he roughly. For, as Ethelbert would not flatter him, he unconsciously proposed not to flatter her. You see he had felt full of the ashes of the past; and those ashes, like a volatile alkali, needed only an acid admixture to ensure a sudden fermentation of soul. The truths which had seemed so sweet to Bertha had been acid to him, and a foam of wrath was choking him as he sputtered: “Who cares?” “That is the question,” said Ethelbert, gathering up the shattered rose: “Who cares?” He gave the bush another cut with his cane; for the fermentation of ideas within was quite unendurable. He had always supposed that women were made on purpose to flatter men, and he had always had so much of it that he was sick of it; but now when he cared a good deal to be thought well of, he felt it was a bit hard to be made to think of himself as he had been made to think all that morning. He had until now thought Ethelbert particularly attractive, because she was so bright; but now he thought her brightness was so overmuch of a good thing as to be perfectly detestable. The same hand that in wanton cruelty was whacking to pieces those exquisite moss rosebuds, would willingly have whacked out of existence all the high human tests of character which had stripped his soul bare before his gaze. Something of this, but not very clearly defined, made him hit the bush again as he looked at Ethelbert, who, free from a suggestion of reproof or sentiment of any kind, repeated: “Who cares?” “I don’t,” said Reginald; and after a pause: “Do you?”