“I wonder who told you?” my victim remarked. “But it doesn’t really matter. Everybody is bound to know it. You surely were the last person with him in the churchyard?” “Gracious!” I admitted again with splendidly mendacious veracity. “How we do find each other out in Kings Port!” It was not by any means the least of the delights which I took in the company of this charming girl that sometimes she was too much for me, and sometimes I was too much for her. It was, of course, just the accident of our ages; in a very few years she would catch up, would pass, would always be too much for me. Well, to-day it was happily my turn; I wasn’t going to finish lunch without knowing all she, at any rate, could tell me about the left eye and the man in bed. “Forty years ago,” I now, with ingenuity, remarked, “I suppose it would have been pistols.” She assented. “And I like that better--don’t you--for gentlemen?” “Well, you mean that fists are--” “Yes,” she finished for me. “All the same,” I maintained, “don’t you think that there ought to be some correspondence, some proportion, between the gravity of the cause and the gravity of--” “Let the coal-heavers take to their fists!” she scornfully cried. “People of our class can’t descend--” “Well, but,” I interrupted, “then you give the coal-heavers the palm for discrimination.” “How’s that?” “Why, perfectly! Your coal-heaver kills for some offenses, while for lighter ones he--gets a bruise over the left eye.” “You don’t meet it, you don’t meet it! What is an insult ever but an insult?” “Oh, we in the North notice certain degrees--insolence, impudence, impertinence, liberties, rudeness--all different.” She took up my phrase with a sudden odd quietness. “You in the North.” “Why, yes. We have, alas! to expect and allow for rudeness sometimes, even in our chosen few, and for liberties in their chosen few; it’s only the hotel clerk and the head waiter from whom we usually get impudence; while insolence is the chronic condition of the Wall Street rich.” “You in the North!” she repeated. “And so your Northern eyes can’t see it, after all!” At these words my intelligence sailed into a great blank, while she continued: “Frankly--and forgive me for saying it--I was hoping that you were one Northerner who would see it.” “But see what?” I barked in my despair. She did not help me. “If I had been a man, nothing could have insulted me more than that. And that’s what you don’t see,” she regretfully finished. “It seems so strange.” I sat in the midst of my great blank, while her handsome eyes rested upon me. In them was that look of a certain inquiry and a certain remoteness with which one pauses, in a museum, before some specimen of the cave-dwelling man.