"They'll fall over themselves with joy to think I'm settled for life! I'm afraid I've been a cussed nuisance to Uncle Henry," he said, ruefully; "always doing fool things, you know,--I mean when I was a boy. And he's been great, always. But I know he's been afraid I'd take a wild flight in actresses." "'_Wild_' flight? What will he call--" She caught her breath. "He'll call it a 'wild flight in angels'!" he said. The word made her put a laughing and protesting hand (which he kissed) over his lips. Then she said that she remembered Mr. Houghton: "I met him a long time ago; when--when you were a little boy." "And yet here you are, 'Mrs. Maurice Curtis!' Isn't it supreme?" he demanded. The moment was so beyond words that it made him sophomoric--which was appropriate enough, even though his freshman year had been halted by those examinations, which had so "jarred" his guardian. "I'll be twenty in September," he said. Evidently the thought of his increasing years gave him pleasure. That Eleanor's years were also increasing did not occur to him; and no wonder, for, compared to people like Mr. and Mrs. Houghton, Eleanor was young enough!--only thirty-nine. It was back in the 'nineties that she had met her husband's guardian, who, in those days, had been the owner of a cotton mill in Mercer, but who now, instead of making money, cultivated potatoes (and tried to paint). Eleanor knew the Houghtons when they were Mercer mill folk, and, as she said, this charming youngster--living then in Philadelphia--had been "a little boy"; now, here he was, her husband for "fifty-four minutes." And she was almost forty, and he was nineteen. That Henry Houghton, up on his mountain farm, pottering about in his big, dusty studio, and delving among his potatoes, would whistle, was to be expected. "But who cares?" Maurice said. "It isn't his funeral."