"He had a face and a body that showed a good many men looking out of 'em at you, and all of 'em was men you'd like to of known. There was scholars that understood a lot, and gentlemen that acted easy, and outdoor men that had pioneered through hard things and had took their joy of the open. All of them had worked hard at him--and had give him his strength and his merriness and his big, broad shoulders and his nice, friendly boyishness, and his eyes that could see considerably more than was set before them. By his own care he had knit his body close to life, and I know he had knit his spirit close to it, too. As I looked over at him that night, my being nervous sort of swelled up into a lump in my throat and I wanted to say inside me: O God, ain't it nice, ain't it nice that you've got some folks like him? "He glanced over to me, kind of whimsical. "'Are you in favour of folks or tombstones?' he asks, with his eyebrows flickering up. "'Me?' I says. 'Well, I don't want to be clannish, but I do lean a good deal towards folks.' "'You knew what I meant to-night?' he says. "'Yes,' I answered, 'I knew.' "'I thought you did,' he says grave. "Then he lapsed into keeping still again and so did I, me through not quite knowing what to say, and him--well, I wasn't sure, but I thought he acted a good deal as if he had something nice to think about. I've seen that look on people's faces sometimes, and it always makes me feel a little surer that I'm a human being. I wondered if it was his new work he was turning over, or his liking the child's being cared for, or the mere nice minute, there by the grate fire. Then a door upstairs shut, and somebody come down and into the room, and when he got up, his look sort of centred in that new minute. "It was Miss Sidney that come in, and she set down by the fire like something pleased her. "'Aunt Eleanor is going to decorate Christopher herself,' she says. 'She believes that she alone can do whatever comes up in this life to be done, and usually she's right.' "Insley stood looking at her for a minute before he set down again. She had her big black cloak off by then, and she was wearing a dress-for-in-the-house that was all rosy. She wasn't anything of the star any longer. She was something more than a star. I always think one of the nicest commonplace minutes in a woman's everyday is when she comes back from somewheres outside the house where she's been, and sets down by the fire, or by a window, or just plain in the middle of the room. They always talk about pigeons 'homing'; I wish't they kept that word for women. It seems like it's so exactly what they _do_ do. "'I love the people,' Miss Sidney went on, 'that always feel that way--that if something they're interested in is going to be really well done, then they must do it themselves.'