"She warned me that it would be so, long ago. I did not believe it; I could not comprehend it. But, somehow, Lily has made me believe it. And so have you. I guess it must be true. And if that's all I have to offer my wife, it's not enough to compensate her for her loss of freedom and happiness and self-respect among those who really care for her." "Do you give me to understand that you renounce all intentions of marrying this girl?" asked his father, breaking more toast into his bowl of milk. "Yes," said his son, listlessly. "Thank God!" said his father; "come here, my son." They shook hands; the son's lifeless arm fell to his side and he stood looking at the floor in silence. The father took a spoonful of hot milk with satisfaction, and, after the younger man had left the room, he resumed his newspaper. He was particularly interested in the "Sunshine Column," which dispensed sweetness and light under a poetic caption too beautiful to be true in a coldly humorous world. * * * * * That afternoon Gordon Collis said abruptly to Neville: "You look like the devil, Louis." "Do I?" "You certainly do." And, in a lower voice: "I guess I've heard what's the matter. Don't worry. It's a thing about which nobody ever ought to give anybody any advice--so I'll give you some. Marry whoever you damn please. It'll be all the same after that oak I planted this morning is half grown." "Gordon," he said, surprised, "I didn't suppose _you_ were liberal." "Liberal! Why, man alive! Do you think a fellow can live out of doors as I have lived, and see germs sprout, and see mountain ranges decay, and sit on a few glaciers, and swing a pick into a mother-lode--and _not_ be liberal? Do you suppose ten-cent laws bother me when I'm up against the blind laws that made the law-makers?--laws that made life itself before Christ lived to conform to them?... I married where I loved. It chanced that my marriage with your sister didn't clash with the sanctified order of things in Manhattan town. But if your sister had been the maid who dresses her, and I had loved her, I'd have married her all the same and have gone about the pleasures and duties of procreation and conservation exactly as I go about 'em now.... I wonder how much the Almighty was thinking about Tenth Street when the first pair of anthropoids mated? _Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus_. If you love each other--_Noli pugnare duobus._ ... And I'm going into the woods to look for ginseng. Want to come?" Neville went. Cameron and Stephanie, equipped with buckskin gloves, a fox terrier, and digging apparatus, joined them just where the slender meadow brook entered the woods. "There are mosquitoes here!" exclaimed Cameron wrathfully. "All day and every day I'm being stung down town, and I'm not going to stand for it here!"