"Blue ran the flash across," he quoted thoughtfully. But it was not of blue violets that the great lawyer was thinking; it was of personality, of personality that was like a flame, flashing across dullness and smugness and cheap pride, to what cost? Watts Shipman, climbing to his mountain top, questioned, for no man knew better than he the painful cost of honest personality. CHAPTER XIII PEARS AND POETRY Out toward the rear of the Judge's place there were garden paths set about with horny fruit trees. A small plot of low-growing vegetables; a strip of turf and a square of bean poles, made a jungle of kitchen produce. As the season advanced, early summer pears of a soft yellow, rosy-cheeked sort, began to hang in globules on the gray-flaked trees. Here Colter sometimes worked under the Judge's snapped comments, or sat at luncheon hour, preferring to eat here rather than in the comfortable kitchen; and here, because of its almost jungle-like inaccessibility, Sard, wandering from the house, would sometimes sit in the long slumberous grasses and read. No one else cared much for the vegetable plot nor for the yellow pears. Miss Aurelia stayed away on the ground of wasps; the Judge found that the grass ruined his highly polished boots; the cook and the waitresses had prejudices connected with snakes, but Sard wondered if the "man on the place" ever saw, as she, lying on her back, sometimes saw, the romance of this nook. The tent of the blue sky, the silken whir of birds winging through, the syncopatic throb of life in the grass all around, the Dervish-like attitude of the old trees holding in faithful remembrance of youth and blossoms their honey-filled pots of gold. It was at the noon hour that the two girls came to pick up windfalls. They waded through the long grass lamenting the great dark bruises on the soft pear shapes. "One smashing fall, and a whole lovely pear is spoiled," complained Minga. "Something like people," Sard thought; "one bruise makes us say a pear is 'spoiled.' A person does some one thing that isn't right, and then as it has with Terence, it spreads out and out and we think of him not as having his other good qualities, but of just that one thing. Terence might have been a good horse trainer or a good pianist or a ship's captain or anything that needs recklessness and short swift purpose, but he has done the one great awful thing that blots out all those other qualities and that makes him for all time just a murderer." The girl thoughtfully stood, her head drooping and her face deep with a curious shadow of tragedy that was partly inherited. Sard felt sure that somewhere in her ancestry were people who cared in some deep way for humanity, who agonized and were sorry as she was for all the sadness and madness of the world. The thought comforted her. Now, as she picked up pear after pear and caught sight of Colter kneeling, busy putting ashes around the roots of blackberry vines, she called to him.