"'My heavens, dear,' he says--and I judged Alex had got to be one of them men that lays a lace 'dear' over a haircloth tone of voice, and so solemnly believes they're keeping their temper--'My heavens, dear, don't misunderstand me. Experiment as much as you like. Material is cheap and abundant. If you don't feel the responsibility, have him educated wherever you want to. But don't expect me to play father to him. The personal contact is going it a little too strong.' "'That is exactly what he most needs,' says Robin. "'Come, dear,' says Alex, 'that's elemental--in an age when everybody can do things better than one can do them oneself.' "She didn't say nothing, and just set there, with her tea. Alex was watching her, and I knew just about as sure what he was thinking as though I had been his own thought, oozing out of his mind. He was watching her with satisfaction, patterned off with a kind of quiet amusement and jabbed into by a kind of worryin' wonder. How exactly, he was thinking, she was the type everlasting of Wife. She was girlish, and in little things she was all I'll-do-as-you-say, and she was even shy; he believed that he was marrying a girl whose experience of the world was commendably slight, whose ideas about it was kind of vague--commendably again; and whose ways was easy-handled, like skein silk. By her little firmnesses, he see that she had it in her to be firm, but what he meant was that she should adopt his ideas and turn firm about them. He had it all planned out that he was going to embroider her brain with his notions of what was what. But all of a sudden, now and then, there she was confronting him as she had just done then with a serious, settled look of Woman--the Woman everlasting, wanting a garden, wanting to work, wanting a child.... "In the doorway back of Alex, Bayless come in, carrying a tray, but it didn't have no card. "'It's somebody to speak with you a minute, Mr. Proudfit,' says Bayless. 'It's Mr. Insley.' "'Have him come here,' Alex says. 'I hope,' he says, when the man was gone, 'that the poor fellow has changed his mind about our little festivities.' "Robin sort of tipped up her forehead. 'Why _poor_?' she asks. "'Poor,' says Alex, absent, 'because he lives in a pocket of the world, instead of wearing the world like a garment--when it would fit him.' "I was just setting my tea-cup down when she answered, and I recollect I almost jumped: "'He knows something better to do with the world than to wear it at all,' was what she said. "I looked over at her. And maybe it was because she was sort of indignant, and maybe it was because she thought she had dared quite a good deal, but all of a sudden something sort of seemed to me to set fire to the minute, and it leaped up like a time by itself as we heard Insley's step crossing the library and coming towards us....