e it entirely to me?"

"Of course," she said.

"Well, then," he decided, "if I've still got that paper--and I think I
have ... I copied it, I remember, out of an old law-book, and to satisfy
Luigi's passion for the picturesque and the liturgical we took it to a
notary and got it sealed with a big red wafer--Well, if I've got it and
it's any good, I'll let Aldrich,--is that his name?--make what he can of
it. I'll square it with Luigi afterward of course."

"It's a compromise for you," she said gravely. "You wouldn't have done
that two weeks ago."

He laughed. "Folks use the word uncompromising as if it were always a
praiseworthy thing to be. But it hardly ever is, if you stop to think.
Certainly if life's an art, like composing music or painting pictures,
then compromise is in the very fabric of it. Getting different themes or
colors that would like to be contradictory, to work together; developing
a give and take. What's the important thing? To have a life that's full
and good and serviceable, or to mince along through it with two or three
sacred attitudes?--Wait a minute."

She waited contentedly enough, watching him with a misty smile as he lay
upon the grass beside her wrestling with his idea.

"All right," he said presently. "Here's the test that I'll agree to. I'll
agree to do things or to leave them undone, to the end that when
I'm--sixty, say, I'll have packed more of real value into my life--my
life as your husband and the father of your children--than that vagabond
you're so concerned about would have had in his if--if ..."

"If I hadn't gone to him a week ago last night?" She said it steadily
enough, where he could not say it at all.

"Yes," he said. "That's what I mean."

He reached out for her hand and she gave it to him. Presently his face
brightened once more into a grin. "I'll even promise to write more music.
Lord, if I've really got anything, you couldn't stop me. Come along.
Father and mother will be looking for us before very long now."

The critics agreed that the _premiere_ of March's opera was a "distinct
success," and then proceeded to disagree about everything else. The dean
of the corps found it somewhat too heavily scored in the orchestra and
the vocal parts rather ungrateful, technically. The reactionary put up
his regular plaintive plea for melody but supposed this was too much to
ask, these days. The chauvinist detected German influence in the music
(he had missed the parodic sati