It stands a thing strangest of all, how differently one will regard another when the time is this or that. Peg, as I have written, would seem ever to me the rompish child; for my thoughts of her were forged and beaten out upon the stithy of those moments when, free and playful and without restraint, she sat alone with me. By the same token! I recall another score of moments where the stage was a drawing room and strange folk framed the scene, and Peg, a beautiful woman of dignity and grave reserve, would remind one of no child at all. But then she would not be Peg to me; on such times when this proud, sufficient being made me some sweeping, stately recognition, and as though I had known her but a day, I have stood aside to wonder was she that playful leopard Peg whose white mark I wore on my hand? Was it she to call me “slave” and kiss the mark, or “watch-dog” and make me a collar with her arms? And still I liked her thus. I was proud to see her proud; and my bosom would swell to note how when Peg, fastidious, and with her highbred look, stepped across a room, she seemed among the women gathered there--and they the Vere de Veres--a greyhound among poodles, or rather the leopard she was among a troop of tabbies. These be crude comparisons, surely; yet there comes no other to so fit with my thoughts of rearward days when Peg moved an empress in the midst of peasants, at once the envy and despair of rivalry. As I tell you, for all these exhibitions of commanding womanhood, Peg would continue with me but a child; the image of such ballroom triumphs were not to remain with me, while the real Peg, the true Peg, the dear Peg of memory when alone, would ever be the laughing, mocking, hectoring, teasing Peg on her leathern throne at my desk's end. It is the same with men; there come such words as play and work, and danger and safety; and the man you saw on the battle-line, as stern and as brave as Caesar, is that boy by yonder campfire who now laughs over some tale of personal chicken-pillage when he fled before a mad old dame armed of a pudding stick. While Peg and I were on these long-range terms, I went more in hunt of the General for his company's sake and for conversation. I do not think the General stood aware of Peg's cold pose towards me, for, as I have urged, he was no one to see such things; besides, Peg, who showed herself no bad strategist, would be about me with the friendliness of those days that were, whenever the General sat by to make a third. Peg held the General in a best esteem; and then, too, she would be mindful how lately he was ill and save for her tending might have died, and be the last to vex him with thoughts of how two so near him and dear upon his sentiment nourished a feud among themselves.