as to some wonderful
elder brother.

"You rest me, Mrs. Kelver," he would say, lighting his pipe and sinking
down into the deep leathern chair that always waited for him in our
parlour. "Your even voice, your soft eyes, your quiet hands, they soothe
me."

"It is good for a man," he would say, looking from one to the other of
us through the hanging smoke, "to test his wisdom by two things:
the face of a good woman, and the ear of a child--I beg your pardon,
Paul--of a young man. A good woman's face is the white sunlight. Under
the gas-lamps who shall tell diamond from paste? Bring it into the
sunlight: does it stand that test? Then it is good. And the children!
they are the waiting earth on which we fling our store. Is it chaff and
dust or living seed? Wait and watch. I shower my thoughts over our Paul,
Mrs. Kelver. They seem to me brilliant, deep, original. The young beggar
swallows them, forgets them. They were rubbish. Then I say something
that dwells with him, that grows. Ah, that was alive, that was a seed.
The waiting earth, it can make use only of what is true."

"You should marry, Hal," my mother would say. It was her panacea for all
mankind.

"I would, Mrs. Kelver," he answered her on one occasion, "I would
to-morrow if I could marry half a dozen women. I should make an ideal
husband for half a dozen wives. One I should neglect for five days, and
be a burden to upon the sixth."

From any other than Hal my mother would have taken such a remark, made
even in jest, as an insult to her sex. But Hal's smile was a coating
that could sugar any pill.

"I am not one man, Mrs. Kelver, I am half a dozen. If I were to marry
one wife she would be married to six husbands. It is too many for any
woman to manage."

"Have you never fallen in love?" asked my mother.

"Three of me have, but on each occasion the other five of me out-voted
him."

"You're sure six would be sufficient?" queried my mother, smiling.

"Just the right number, Mrs. Kelver. There is one of me must worship,
adore a woman madly, abjectly; grovel before her like the Troubadour
before his Queen of Song, eat her slipper, drink the water she has
washed in, scourge himself before her window, die for a kiss of her
glove flung down with a laugh. She must be scornful, contemptuous,
cruel. There is another I would cherish, a tender, yielding creature,
one whose face would light at my coming, cloud at my going; one to whom
I should be a god. There is a th