You're Addington to the bone,
and Esther's a primitive squaw. You've nothing whatever to do with one
another, you two. It's absurd."

Choate sat looking at the landscape which no longer wavered. The boys
ran fairly straight now. Suddenly he began to laugh. He laughed
gaspingly, hysterically, and Jeff regarded him from time to time
tolerantly and smoked.

"I know what you're thinking," he said, when Alston stopped, with a last
splutter, and wiped his eyes. "You're thinking, between us we've broken
all the codes. I have vilified my wife. I've warned you against her and
you haven't resented it. It shows the value of extreme common-sense in
affairs of the heart. It shows also that I haven't an illusion left
about Esther, and that you haven't either. And if we say another word
about it we shall have to get up and fight, to save our self-respect."

So Alston did now light his cigarette and they went on smoking. They
talked about the boys at their game and only when the players came down
to the scow, presumably to push over and buy doughnuts of Ma'am Fowler,
did they get up to go. As they turned away from the scene of boyish
intimacies, involuntarily they stiffened into another manner; there was
even some implication of mutual dislike in it, of guardedness, one
against the other. But when they parted at the corner of the street
Alston, out of his perplexity, ventured a question.

"I should be very glad to be told if, as you say, you took the necklace
out of Esther's bag, why you took it."

"Sorry," said Jeff. "You deserve to be told the whole business. But you
can't be."

So he went home, knowing he was going to an inquiring Lydia. And how
would an exalted common-sense work if presented to Lydia? He thought of
it all the way. How would it do if, in these big crises of the heart,
men and women actually told each other what they thought? It was not the
way of nature as she stood by their side prompting them to their most
picturesque attitude, that her work might be accomplished, saying to the
man, "Prove yourself a devil of a fellow because the girl desires a
hero," and to the girl, "Be modesty and gentleness ineffable because
that is the complexion a hero loves." And the man actually believes he
is a hero and the girl doesn't know she is hiding herself behind a veil
too dazzling to let him see her as she is. How would it be if they
outwitted nature at her little game and gave each other the fealty of
blood brothers, the