I took Slocum to call on my new acquaintance, but they didn't get on well together. She thought his old Yankee ways were hard, and I suppose he thought I was bound on the voyage of life with a pleasure-loving mate. He used to growl to me about tying myself to a woman, but I always said he needn't worry about me--I wasn't the marrying kind. "Oh, you'll be wanting to get married the same as the rest of the world," Sloco would answer, "and have a wife and children to spend your money on and make you earn more!" But I thought differently. A man of my sort, I replied to him, works and fights just the same without wife or child, because of the fight in him, because he can't help himself, any more than the man who wants to drink can keep his lips from the glass. It's in his blood and bone.... Miss Gentles had seen a good deal of society,--the best there was in the city in those early days. It was odd to hear her talking about people who were just big names to me, as if she had known them all her life. I must have struck her as pretty green. But she made me feel from the first like some one she had always known. She was proud enough, but simple, and not in the least reserved. She told me all about her people, the easy times and the hard times. And never a word of complaint or regret for all the parties and good things that were gone out of her life. She was one to take her beer with a joke when she couldn't have champagne. Of course, I told her, first and last, all my story. She made me take her to see the Hostetters at the old place on Van Buren Street. Then the four of us went up the lake on a picnic one Sunday. Hillary, I remember, was sullen because Ed paid so much attention to Miss Gentles on this trip. So we became good friends. Yet I never felt really intimate with her, as I had with Hillary, and when I tried to step past a certain line she had her own way of keeping me off, not haughtily or pertly, but like a lady who knew how people of the great world, where I had never been, behaved to one another. One day, I remember, I was fool enough to send her a little fancy purse with a gold eagle in it, and a line saying that it was time for me to make restitution, or something of the sort. My gift came back quick enough, with a clever little note tucked inside, saying she couldn't let me admit that I had taken her purse. It was a good lesson for me.