The obligation, though, was mutual; it fell both ways. If from him she was absorbing a belated respect for the moralities and a desire to put on certain small grace-notes of culture, she in return was giving the antiquarian company for long hours which otherwise would have been his hours of homesickness and loneliness. Probably he was used to loneliness. He never had married--a fact which he had confided to her in their first prolonged talk. But beyond question he would, lacking her companionship, have been most woefully homesick. So she let him bore her with interminable stories of a time which was to her more ancient that the Stone Age, to the end that he should not be bored. It cost her an effort, but from some heretofore unused reservoir of her shallow being she pumped up the patience to lend a seemingly attentive ear while he discoursed unendingly and with almost an infantile vanity upon the glories of the stock from which he sprang. These repetitious tales of grandeur were pitched in the past tense; she took due note of that. She fully understood that his time of affluence was behind him. He didn't tell her so. There was about him no guile. At seventy-nine he was as innocent a babe as ever strayed in the Hollywood woods. Nevertheless it would appear that by his code a gentleman did not plead his poverty. Honorable achievement might be mentioned; but adversity, even honorable adversity, was not a subject for conversation. But she saw how threadbare his black frock coat had become and how shiny along the seams, and how fragile and ready to fall apart his linen was. A woman would see those things. Adversity was spreading over him like a mold. But it was a clean mold. Soon, unless his fortunes mended, he would be downright shabby; but never would he be squalid or careless of the small niceties. That much was to be sensed as a certainty. For sake of his peace of mind she secretly was glad that she had never let him see her smoking cigarettes. It seemed that in his day ladies had not smoked cigarettes. She sat up through most of one night letting out hems in her skirts. She concealed from him that she used a lip-stick and face paint. She derived a tardy satisfaction from the circumstance that in a feminine world almost universally barbered and bobbed she, months before she met him, had elected to keep her curls unshorn. Then her intent had been to conform to the image she was assuming. Flappers were common among the juveniles and some who could not be rated among the juveniles likewise flapped; but who knew when a casting director might require an old-fashioned type of girl for a costume piece. Her present reward was the old Captain's praise for her tawny poll. He was much given to saying that a woman's crowning glory was her hair and deploring the tendency of the newer generation to shear and shingle until the average woman's head was like the average boy's.