Devereux watched him meditatively until he was gone; then he too shook his head--and sat drumming on the chair-arm with his finger tips. "What is it?" asked Pendleton, who had approached from the rear. "What do you see, Dev--a pretty girl?" "Do I look it?" said Devereux, glancing around. "Now that you favor me with your full countenance, I can't say that you do," the other smiled, swinging a chair around for his feet and sitting down. "You are evidently bunkered or have topped your drive. I beg your pardon for intruding--don't let me interrupt, I pray." "I wasn't playing mental golf--I was thinking." "I see," said Pendleton. "A good occupation--continue to think, if it isn't too exhausting." "I was thinking and wondering," Devereux continued--"why Stephanie Mourraille married Lorraine. What in the devil's name did she see in him anyway!--What _could_ she see in him!" "Qualities which you and I and the other men are blind to," said Montague dryly. "Woman has the power of endowing the man with whom she imagines she is in love, with every attribute that he should normally possess--and rarely does. We're all deficient, Devereux, at the Bar of Popular Opinion--it is only a matter of degree." "Well, I should say that Lorraine is the maximum degree--and then some," was the reply.--"And that Stephanie knows it at last--when it is too late. Why didn't you marry her, Pendleton? Everyone thought _you_ were willing--and _she_ ought to have been." Pendleton sent a smoke whirling upward, and followed it with another, and another--but said no word. "It's a bit personal, I know--and you shouldn't answer," Devereux admitted--"but all the same, why didn't you?" "Maybe Stephanie wouldn't have me," said Pendleton slowly. "The more fool she!" the other exclaimed. "Yet it's like a woman--they never know what is best for them when they have a choice to make--at least, they choose wrong thirty-five times out of fifty." "And forty-five out of fifty they think they are the winning fifteen--and fifty times out of fifty, it is no one's business but their own," Pendleton replied. "You're right in theory," Devereux admitted, "but you're wrong in practice. We have some business with our friends' affairs--enough to regret when we see one of them, especially a woman, going on the rocks from very heedlessness of the buoys that mark the channel." "Why not chain in the channel so they can't get out of it?" asked Pendleton. "They would break the chains from very perversity and go on the rocks just the same," Devereux averred. "The only way is to provide a pilot who won't run amuck." "You're mixing your metaphors, old man!" "Maybe I am, but you know what I mean." "Stephanie chose a pilot," Pendleton reminded him.