There was a sort of recoil from him in her tone, which perhaps he felt. It seemed to interest, rather than offend him. "You don't get the artistic point of view." "I don't want to get it, if that's it. And if your play is going to be about any such thing as that--" "It isn't," said Maxwell. "I failed on that. I shall try a comic motive." "Oh!" said Louise, in the concessive tone people use, when they do not know but they have wronged some one. She spiritually came back to him, but materially she rose to go away and leave him. She stooped for the letter he had dropped out of the hammock and gave it him. "Don't you want this?" "Oh, thank you! I'd forgotten it." He glanced at the superscription, "It's from Pinney. You ought to know Pinney, Miss Hilary, if you want the _true_ artistic point of view." "Is he a literary man?" "Pinney? Did you read the account of the defalcation in the _Events_--when it first came out? All illustrations?" "_That?_ I don't wonder you didn't care to read his letter! Or perhaps he's your friend--" "Pinney's everybody's friend," said Maxwell, with an odd sort of relish. "He's delightful. I should like to do Pinney. He's a type." Louise stood frowning at the mere notion of Pinney. "He's not a bad fellow, Miss Hilary, though he _is_ a remorseless interviewer. He would be very good material. He is a mixture of motives, like everybody else, but he has only one ambition: he wants to be the greatest newspaper man of his generation. The ladies nearly always like him. He never lets five minutes pass without speaking of his wife; he's so proud of her he can't keep still." "I should think she would detest him." "She doesn't. She's quite as proud of him as he is of her. It's affecting to witness their devotion--or it would be if it were not such a bore." "I can't understand you," said Louise, leaving him to his letter. XV. Part of Matt Hilary's protest against the status in which he found himself a swell was to wash his face for dinner in a tin basin on the back porch, like the farm-hands. When he was alone at the farm he had the hands eat with him; when his mother and sister were visiting him he pretended that the table was too small for them all at dinner and tea, though he continued to breakfast with the hands, because the ladies were never up at his hour; the hands knew well enough what it meant, but they liked Matt. Louise found him at the roller-towel, after his emblematic ablutions. "Oh, is it so near dinner?" she asked. "Yes. Where is Maxwell?" "I left him up at the camp." She walked a little way out into the ground-ivy that matted the back-yard under the scattering spruce trees. Matt followed, and watched the homing and departing bees around the hives in the deep, red-clovered grass near the wall. "Those fellows will be swarming before long," he said, with a measure of the good comradeship he felt for all living things.