“Oh, don’t be the wide-eyed ingénue. You know damned well what I mean. You’ve got me and you don’t want me. If I had been a successful architect instead of a successful business man would that have made any difference?” He was thinking of what his mother had said just a few years back, that night when they had talked at her bedside. “Is that it? He’s got to be an artist, I suppose, to interest you.” “Good Lord, no! Some day I’ll probably marry a horny-handed son of toil, and if I do it’ll be the horny hands that will win me. If you want to know, I like ’em with their scars on them. There’s something about a man who has fought for it—I don’t know what it is—a look in his eye—the feel of his hand. He needn’t have been successful—though he probably would be. I don’t know. I’m not very good at this analysis stuff. I only know he—well, you haven’t a mark on you. Not a mark. You quit being an architect, or whatever it was, because architecture was an uphill disheartening job at the time. I don’t say that you should have kept on. For all I know you were a bum architect. But if you had kept on—if you had loved it enough to keep on—fighting, and struggling, and sticking it out—why, that fight would show in your face to-day—in your eyes and your jaw and your hands and in your way of standing and walking and sitting and talking. Listen. I’m not criticizing you. But you’re all smooth. I like ’em bumpy. That sounds terrible. It isn’t what I mean at all. It isn’t——” “Oh, never mind,” Dirk said, wearily. “I think I know what you mean.” He sat looking down at his hands—his fine strong unscarred hands. Suddenly and unreasonably he thought of another pair of hands—his mother’s—with the knuckles enlarged, the skin broken—expressive—her life written on them. Scars. She had them. “Listen, Dallas. If I thought—I’d go back to Hollis & Sprague’s and begin all over again at forty a week if I thought you’d——” “Don’t.” XX General Goguet and Roelf Pool had been in Chicago one night and part of a day. Dirk had not met them—was to meet them at Paula’s dinner that evening. He was curious about Pool but not particularly interested in the warrior. Restless, unhappy, wanting to see Dallas (he admitted it, bitterly) he dropped into her studio at an unaccustomed hour almost immediately after lunch and heard gay voices and laughter. Why couldn’t she work alone once in a while without that rabble around her! Dallas in a grimy smock and the scuffed kid slippers was entertaining two truants from Chicago society—General Emile Goguet and Roelf Pool. They seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. She introduced Dirk as casually as though their presence were a natural and expected thing—which it was. She had never mentioned them to him. Yet now: “This is Dirk DeJong—General Emile Goguet. We were campaigners together in France. Roelf Pool. So were we, weren’t we, Roelf?”