they could float so high. He saw the sun on
them and thought they were the lanterns that lighted up the show. Jeff
believed he had discovered the clever little trick at the bottom of the
game, the trick that should give over to your grasp the right handle at
last. This was that every man, once knowing he was a prisoner, should
laugh at his fetters and break them by his own muscle.

"The trouble is," he said, at breakfast, when Mary Nellen was bringing
in the waffles, "we're all such liars."

The colonel sat there in a mild peaceableness, quite another man under
the tan of his honest intimacy with the sun. He had been up hoeing an
hour before breakfast, and helped himself to waffles liberally, while
Mary Nellen looked, with all her intellectual aspirations in her eyes,
at Jeff.

"No, no," said the colonel. He was conscious of very kindly feelings
within himself, and believed in nearly everybody but Esther. She, he
thought, might have a chance of salvation if she could be reborn,
physically hideous, into a world obtuse to her.

"Liars!" said Jeff mildly. "We're doing the things we're expected to do,
righteous or not. And we're saying the things we don't believe."

"That's nothing but kindness," said the colonel. Mary Nellen made a
pretence of business at the side table, and listened greedily. She would
take what she had gathered to the kitchen and discuss it to rags. She
found the atmosphere very stimulating. "If I asked Lydia here whether
she found my hair thin, Lydia would say she thought it beautiful hair,
wouldn't you, Lyddy? She couldn't in decency tell me I'm as bald as a
rat."

"It is beautiful," said Lydia. "It doesn't need to be thick."

Jeff had refused waffles. He thrust his hands in his pockets and leaned
back, regarding his father with a smile. The lines in his face, Lydia
thought, fascinated, were smoothed out, all but the channels in the
forehead and the cleft between his brows. That last would never go.

"I am simply," said Jeff, "so tickled I can hardly contain myself. I
have discovered something."

"What?" said Lydia.

"The world," said Jeff. "Here it is. It's mine. I can have it to play
with. It's yours. You can play, too. So can that black-eyed army Madame
Beattie has mobilised. So can she."

Anne was looking at him in a serious anxiety.

"With conditions as they are--" said she, and Jeff interrupted her
without scruple.

"That's the point. With conditions as they are, we've got to dig