“Do I care that I can’t put the rose together again? I don’t aspire to do that; yet I do very much care to have all the power I can possibly obtain with which to arrest the destruction of beautiful life and orderly happiness.” “Oh, yes, much you care to make a fellow happy,” said Reginald sullenly. “Look at the cold-blooded way you sat there and talked to that miserable thing about me.” And after waiting again, he said with the combativeness of a man opposed by silence, when instead he longed for a quarrel: “Now this is all very well, Miss Daksha, but you know that if you noticed—noticed—well, as you might say—if you smelt whiskey on her (now you’ve got it), if you smelt whiskey on her, you could—you are sharp enough to notice—anything, in fact,” said he, stumbling on under her steady uplifted eyes, “Aren’t you?” “I notice many things,” said Ethelbert, like a little truthful child. He hit the rosebush again. “You are a queer girl,” he said. “You have no respect for a man’s feelings.” “What are those things?” “What things?” “A man’s feelings, I believe you called them,” said Ethelbert. He came near her, with red passion-flushes patching his face like Satan’s finger-prints; and stood angrily looking at her. And then he slashed the air close to her with his cane; but he might as well have shot glances of rage at a lily-cup, in the hope of arresting the sweet aura it exhaled. He turned angrily away. “Well, I can just believe you,” he said. “You neither know nor care what feelings are. You care more about that old rose.” “That depends,” said Ethelbert. “I care for the rose because it is sweet, orderly life. If a man’s feelings are the same, I care just as much for them. But character is not a question of feeling. It is a question of wise action.” He muttered a passionate oath, and hit the bush again. For the devils were “rending him,” and “that kind goeth not out, except by prayer and fasting.” He was not much of a praying man; and as for fasting, his habitual diet and incessant brandy quaffing did not come under that head, nor produce those calming results. Added to this, three months had passed since Ethelbert Daksha had seemed to him as no woman had ever seemed to him before; and in those three months he had been afraid to approach acquaintanceship, because of the infinite distance between them. This distance he, with all his unpublished record of demoralization, had decency enough to recognize. And now he had a feeling akin to hatred toward Ethelbert, that she should have the impudence to know anything of him except what his “good clothes,” not bad-featured face, and his hitherto very silent tongue might have told.