“It remains for you, Tranton, to set an example in this matter. You are a good example as far as you go. You have not been called a nice man without reason. But you pause before the ultimate example. You beg the question.” “Probably the trouble is that I have a fatal veneration for women in general. I think of the individual only as epitomizing the sex. I understand that to be a fatal attitude of mind. Yet I find a corresponding attitude in many young women and women who are not young, and you have no idea how interesting that view makes them.” “Oh, yes I have! That is the trouble. It makes them as interesting as it makes you.” “Then what are you complaining about?” “I am wondering what will become of you.” “Become of me? There you are with your romantic, old-fashioned ideas again. Why should I become? I tell you, life reminds me of one of those boxes built to hold circulars or catalogues or free-distribution periodicals. They are marked on the outside ‘Take one?’ But there is nothing inside. Everything has been taken. We can’t all draw prizes,—we can’t all _be_ prizes. ‘They also serve,’ you know.” “You will be punished,” I said. “When Age has put you through the inquisition, and you have been broken on the wheel—of Time—you will take it all back, and will incur the aspersion of marrying to have some one who will put out your slippers.” “You forget, that in that grand climacteric I shall have some very sweet memories.” “It would be interesting to know what you will think of the American girl—then.” “I can think only one way of her,” said Tranton firmly, and he put away his pipe as he might have taken off his hat. “She puzzles the foreigner, but she need not puzzle us after all. I was reading the other day a British officer’s estimate of our volunteers in Luzon. ‘They might be described,’ he says, ‘as a great military paradox—a body of men of magnificent physique, possessing perfect discipline, and yet without any discipline at all.’ It occurred to me that much the same thing might be said about the American girl. She doesn’t appear to have much discipline, but she has as much as her brothers, and evidently she has all she needs and the sort she needs.” “If you had found her undisciplined, Tranton, you would have seen your duty.”