, both watching, they allowed the boy to depend from it, swing on it
and strain it just enough to make both conscious that the bond was
there.

"You know what I think, Piney," said Steering after a long wait, in
which he had been busy remembering the fulness of one moment in the Bank
of Canaan. "I think that if she is the right woman a man can fall in
love in one minute. And I think that if she is the right woman all
eternity will not give him time to fall out of love with her and no sort
of hell of bad situations will ever be wide enough to keep his thoughts
away from her." Steering spoke with a well-ordered restraint, but a
sense of the combination of situations that he himself had come into
lent a ringing, protesting resonance to his voice, and Piney forgot to
be jealous and flashed him a long, keen look of delight. Steering
realised that he sometimes put into words the things that Piney yearned
toward and dreamed, but could not express; and he also realised, from
the added satisfaction that he got out of his words because of Piney's
satisfaction in them, that Piney sometimes enlivened and enriched his
own emotions for him. Their romancing made boy and man delicately
complementary to each other. Steering had taken Piney's love for the
girl who was beyond him as a fine and simple thing, and, taken in that
way, it played up to Bruce's love with the rich imageries and colours of
youth, and made Bruce younger, quicker for it. Piney, on his side, had a
keen, shy consciousness of immaturity and inexperience that made him
attend upon Bruce's outbursts of passion as upon an illumination of what
this thing of man's love could be and should be at its biggest and best.

"That's just exactly the truth," maintained Steering earnestly. It was
remarkable how earnest he could be on this line of opinion. Miss Elsie
Gossamer would have marvelled to hear him. Time was when he had agreed
with Miss Gossamer that only people who had known each other a long
time, as he and she had, could depend upon their attitude toward each
other. The attitude between Miss Gossamer and him had seemed very
reliable in those prehistoric days when congeniality of taste, a flower
face and the probability of getting through life without much worry on
your mind and a good cigar in your mouth had seemed sufficient to him.
Things like that seemed pitifully insufficient now. He wheeled about
restlessly and considered.

From where he and Piney were they could he