"Why, Avis cannot attempt a word of four syllables without coming at least once to grief! It is a trifle of course, but in a life-long companionship there are exactly fourteen thousand trifles to one event of importance. And deuce take it! the world is populated by men and women, not demi-gods; the poets are specious and abandoned rhetoricians; for it never was, and never will be, possible to love anybody 'to the level of every-day's Most quiet need by sun or candlelight.' "Or not to me at least. "In a sentence, when it comes to a life-long companionship, I prefer not the woman who would make me absolutely happy for a twelvemonth, but rather the woman with whom I could chat contentedly for twenty years, and who would keep me to the mark. I am rather tired of being futile; and not for any moral reason, but because it is not worthy of _me_. In fine, I do not want to die entirely. I want to leave behind some not inadequate expression of Robert Etheridge Townsend, and I do not care at all what people say of it, so that it is here when I am gone. Oh, Stella understood! 'I want my life to count, I want to leave something in the world that wasn't there before I came.' "Now Bettie--" I arose resolutely. "I had much better go for a long, and tedious, and jolting, and universally damnable walk. Bettie would make something vital of me--if I could afford her the material--" And I grinned a little. "'Go, therefore, now, and work; for there shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks.' Yes, you would certainly have need of a miracle, dear Bettie--" 10 I started for that walk I was to take. But Dr. Jeal and Colonel Snawley were seated in armchairs in front of Clarriker's Emporium, just as they had been used to sit there in my college days, enjoying, as the Colonel mentioned, "the cool of the evening," although to the casual observer the real provider of their pleasure would have appeared to be an unlimited supply of chewing-tobacco. So I lingered here, and garnered, to an accompaniment of leisurely expectorations, much knowledge as to the fall crops and the carryings-on of the wife of a celebrated general, upon whose staff the Colonel had served during the War,--and there has never been in the world's history but one war, so far as Fairhaven is concerned,--and how the Colonel walked right in on them, and how it was hushed up. Then we discussed the illness of Pope Leo and what everybody knew about those derned cardinals, and the riots in Evansville, and the Panama Canal business, and the squally look of things at Port Arthur, and attributed all these imbroglios, I think, to the Republican administration. Even at our bitterest, though, we conceded that "Teddy's" mother was a Bulloch, and that his uncle fired the last shot before the Alabama went down. And that inclined us to forgive him everything, except of course, the Booker Washington luncheon.