He had succeeded in winning Patty Jessamine. But what else had he incurred? CHAPTER III Leaving the mansion of such a night and entering a mere house, was less a going in than a going out. The night, vast as space, was yet closer than the flesh, more intimate than the marrow of the bones or the retina that sat behind the eyes and observed. When he left the roomy dark at last he found Patty still asleep, or pretending to be. He could not quite feel sure of her. He never could. It was only of himself and of his idolatry that he was forever sure. If she slept indeed it would be cruel to wake her. If she affected slumber, it was because she prayed to be spared his love. In either case he had not the courage to invade her retreat, or compel her withdrawn presence to return. This sublimity of devotion was ridiculous. But he achieved it. The morning found him still a bachelor. He was amazed at first to hear women’s voices in another room quarreling; it was Patty berating her stupid maid. When he met her at the breakfast table she was serene again, and held up her cheek like a flower to be pressed against his lips. She had taken command of the household, imperious as a young queen, a-simmer with overbubbling pride like a little girl suddenly hoisted to the head of the table in her mother’s absence. Womanlike, she found a strange comfort in the discovery that the china in the house was good, the linen of quality, and the silver dignified. She had erudition of a sort, in a field where he was blankly ignorant. She recognized at once that the gleaming coffee pot was from the elegant hand of Paul Revere himself. “I didn’t know he was a silversmith,” said RoBards. “What else was he famous for?” Patty said. This dazed him as a pretty evidence of the profound difference between a male and a female mind. He started to tell her about what Paul Revere had done when she began to praise his mother’s taste in china. She laughed: “You never saw the pieces of china I did, did you, Mist’ RoBards?” “You did china? You never showed me any!” “It was nothing to boast of. But when I was a little girl at Mrs. Okill’s school, I drew a pattern of a tea-set—a wreath of sweet peas and convolvulus surrounding my initial and a lamb holding a cross. My cousin Peter, who was going out to China as a supercargo, said he would take it with him and have it put on a tea-set. He made fun of my drawing and wrote on the design under the lamb: ‘This is not a wig, but a lamb.’ And in about a year the set came round the Horn in one of my uncle’s ships. But the foolish, long-tailed apes in China had put on every cup and saucer the words, ‘This is not a wig, but a lamb.’ I cried for days, and broke every piece to flinders.”