"Oh, I don't know. It's funny, I have an opinion of you that's miles long. It isn't exactly an opinion, either." Morgan smiled again with approval on Windless Mountain. "If you're going to be subtle I sha'n't understand it," meaning possibly it was the privilege of girls to have half-grown ideas that they could not describe. A man had business with only such as he could handle, put to the use of resolve, statement, or persuasion. If he was unable to express his mind completely, it was because there was rubbish in his mind. But between himself and Windless Mountain, he did not object to Helen's having an opinion of him that was not exactly an opinion. Any one could have an understanding with Windless, that eclectic philosopher, with his feet deep in the earth, fertile loins, jovial belly, the chest of a wrestler, and the gray, scarred head of a prophet. On his flanks were chuckling little rivulets, nesting birds, and all kinds of flitting incident. From a distance you might see his forehead lifted to abstractions, pale-blue, spiritual things. Whatever you said to him, he had an answer to your liking. Whatever your philosophy, somewhere about him he felt much the same. If you hated an enemy, there was a trifle of ice, a certain ambient glacier that once ground him badly, of whom he had no loving remembrance and the grooves whereof were on his bones. He was no moralist. The liar and the thief could find companionship there, the outcast existences more deserted, the murderer note the hawk risen red and screaming from the thicket, and admit a spirit that bettered his own. Only if you were not content in finding a likeness in detail, and wished to look straight to his scarred forehead, you would probably do well to be candid and take your time. What you got from him would be no special advice, but an assurance that he understood you, and there would be something in his manner of understanding that would meet the case and be enough. If it was a moral influence, it lay in bringing you to see the relations of things in size and quality, and in making your own directions more evident. * * * * * "I like Windless best," said Helen, dreamily. "He's the nicest person there is." "It would be no joke to have him in your way." They turned into the garden and up the path between brown, withered flower-beds. "I jumped the fence, anyway, Morgan. It would be idiotic to hurt myself. I won't do it again." "The point was, you didn't mind the colonel." "I'm on a furlough. Take me up Windless again." "Not if you're on a furlough." Chapter IV In which Thaddeus uses the term "Moral Justification"