“Elise is young. She’s full young. Unless Theodora misdirected me, Elise was nineteen last birthday. It kinder goes against the grain with me to think of her marrying yet awhile. “But maybe it would go against the grain later on too. Parents are apt to jib at their children for being made the same way as themselves. They’d like to check ’em with a little spiritual gin, and keep them down to clock-work dolls. “Elise has always been a child to me, and for a long time she was a sick child. “I kept her away from home at a Sanatorium by the sea for four years. I guess she’s told you about it. There ain’t anything organic the matter with Elise now, but she’s frail.” “I’d take care of her,” John interjected quietly and without emphasis; but his tone was convincing. Mr. Brett nodded. “Sure you’d take care of her,” he agreed. “But it won’t be quite the kind of care you mean, John, that you’ll have to take. It’s a taller order. “I see I’ll have to go into this thing with you pretty thoroughly. “I warned my first son-in-law, but he was a Roumanian, and he hadn’t made much study of nervous temperaments. Roumanians sound kind of playful and romantic, but when they aren’t pleased I understand they get rough. He said nobody in his family had ever had nerves, and as it was about fifteen hundred years old, it was what you might call an encouraging record. But Hermione broke it. She is a high-strung American woman and she showed that Roumanian family what nerves mean—she showed it them from start to finish.” Mr. Brett looked away from John Sterling and drew a long breath. “Now John,” he said, “I guess I’ve got to go into things deeper with you than I did with that Roumanian Prince. I’ll go slow and you follow slow—there are things I can’t say, and there are things I must. “Did you know you’re the first secretary I ever had in my house?” John nodded. “But you don’t know why?” asked Mr. Brett. “I didn’t have a secretary to live in till Theodora died. After that I had. It was more convenient. The reason I didn’t have one before was that in two days he’d have been Theodora’s secretary or he’d have been out of the house. “I expect you know that Theodora means the gift of God? “Well, Theodora was no slouch of a gift: she was what the French call a ‘Maîtresse femme.’ I presume that means a winner, don’t it? Sometimes Theodora won because she’d extracted my kick—sometimes she won because she was at death’s door, and made me feel the draught from under it—and sometimes she won because I didn’t know what she was up to. But she always won. “Now Elise isn’t like her mother. She’s got no nervous energy, but she’s got no resistance to nervous energy either. I guess I used all the resistance up in my home life from day to day, and hadn’t any to hand on to the child. “Marriage is a queer thing, John, and the results of it are queerer.