Laying aside his brushes and palette, he went close to her. All the poetry in the world seemed to Jennie to vibrate in his tones. "Making the best of it because you’re born is loving and letting yourself be loved, Jennie." "So it is." She laughed, with a ring of the desperate in her mirth. "You don’t have to tell me that." His voice sank to a whisper. "Then why not do it?" "I would like a shot if I had only myself to think about." "In love, there are only two to think about, Jennie." She laughed—a hard little laugh, in spite of its silvery tinkle. "When I love I’ve got two sisters and a brother, all younger than myself, to bring into the little affair, to say nothing of a nice old dad and a mother that I’m very fond of. I’ve got to love for them as well as for myself—" "Then why don’t you love Bob Collingham?" She threw him a reproachful look. "Don’t! Please don’t! That’s brutal of you! But then, you are brutal, aren’t you? I suppose, if you weren’t, I shouldn’t—" A little nondescript gesture expressed her thought better than she could have put it into words; and with this tribute to the caveman she slipped away again amid the brocades, pedestals, and old furniture. CHAPTER III Marillo Park, N. Y., is more than a park; it is a life. When a social correspondent registers the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bradley Collingham, Miss Edith Collingham, and Mr. Robert Bradley Collingham, Junior, have arrived at Collingham Lodge, Marillo Park, from their camp in the Adirondacks, their farm in Dutchess County, or their apartment in Fifth Avenue, the implications are beyond any that can be set forth in cold print. Cold print will tell you that a man has died, but it can convey no adequate notion of the haven of peace into which presumably he has entered. Cold print might describe Marillo Park as it might describe Warwick Castle or the Château of Chenonceau, with a catalogue of landscapes and architectural minutiæ. It could tell you of charming houses set in artfully laid-out grounds, of gardens, shrubberies, and tennis courts, of the club, the swimming pool, the riding school, the golf links; but only experience could give you that sense of being beyond contact with outside vulgarity which is Marillo’s specialty. Against its high stone wall outside vulgarity breaks as the sea against a cliff; before its beautiful grille gate it swirls like a river at the foot of a lawn with no possibility of overflow. As nearly as may be on earth, the resident of Marillo Park can be barricaded against the sordid, and withdrawn from all things inharmonious with his own high thought.