‘Not a dreamer, if by that you mean that you are sufficiently on the earth to know how to live; but you are a mixture. I saw an old tinker yesterday--a tinker and umbrella-mender combined--a little gray tramp of a fellow, about sixty years old, stubby beard, dirty, self-possessed, master of himself and of the world so far as he was concerned in it, with an optimistic vein in spite of some hard luck, and with the most beautiful clear eyes I ever saw. He was a wanderer--a traveller, I might say. He had seen the greater part of America, and understood it, too, and he had seen it all on foot or by means of stolen car-rides. He fairly made me long to travel, with his tales of Colorado; he was immensely interesting. I talked with him for over an hour while he mended my umbrella and put a new ferule on my cane; and all the time, while I was listening to him, I was thinking: “Now, here is my friend Rob, just as he would have been without the mixture”--the mixture being, of course, your scholarly tastes and your money, half-tinker and half-student. I have no doubt but the tinker had tastes, too, but he hadn’t the money.’ ‘I like the picture of your tinker.’ ‘Yes, you do, that is the trouble; and it’s the tinker part of you that breaks an engagement for a scarf.’ ‘What would you have me do--tell Mabel that I am earnest and interesting, and beg her to marry a tinker?’ ‘No, I fancy the thing is better as it is; but I hope the scholar will have his chance some day. You are thirty?’ ‘Thirty and one.’ ‘Some study, much travel; a little business--not enough for an anchor; wit in one pocket, wisdom late in coming--name, Robert Dudley.’ ‘And till now a friend of Mark’s.’ ‘Always that.’ Rob folded the scarf slowly. It clung to his fingers; it caught wherever chance blew it; it was fluttered against his face while he carefully squared the corners together and patiently rolled its misty length into pocket size. ‘Mabel,’ he said, meditatively and impartially, ‘is much too good for me; she is moral, without being morbid; she is dignified, without being stiff; she is generous, but not weak. She reads people as she reads books. At first she thought I, as a book, was interesting, that I had an ethical flavor; but she found I was only a sort of art for art’s sake literature, and she laid me down. I did not interest her more. She has no sense of humor, and it never occurred to her that her one chance of cultivating it was to marry me. Now _she_ will be different.’ ‘Yes, she will, and some day I shall discover, under a tinker’s garb, my old friend Bob, mending umbrellas for a living, the mixture having lost its savor and the money gone.’ ‘I have never heard you stick so to a simile--it seems to please you. I like your tinker idea, but I deny the outcome.’ ‘Well, good-bye. I am sorry for it all.’ ‘No need for that; Mabel is rid of her tinker--_so_ far, so good; the rest “lies on the knees of the Gods.”’