Nan Brent on Saturday night, Donald McKaye
went directly to the mill office, in front of which his car was
parked, entered the car, and drove home to The Dreamerie, quite
oblivious of the fact that he was not the only man in Port Agnew who
had spent an interesting and exciting evening. So thoroughly mixed
were his emotions that he was not quite certain whether he was
profoundly happy or incurably wretched. When he gave way to rejoicing
in his new-found love, straightway he was assailed by a realization of
the barriers to his happiness--a truly masculine recognition of the
terrible bar sinister to Nan's perfect wifehood induced a veritable
shriveling of his soul, a mental agony all the more intense because it
was the first unhappiness he had ever experienced.

His distress was born of the knowledge that between the Sawdust Pile
and The Dreamerie there stretched a gulf as wide and deep as the Bight
of Tyee. He was bred of that puritanical stock which demands that the
mate for a male of its blood must be of original purity, regardless of
the attitude of leniency on the part of that male for lapses from
virtue in one of his own sex. This creed, Donald had accepted as
naturally, as inevitably as he had accepted belief in the communion of
saints and the resurrection of the dead. His father's daughter-in-law,
like Caesar's wife, would have to be above suspicion; while Donald
believed Nan Brent to be virtuous, or, at least, an unconscious,
unwilling, and unpremeditating sinner, non-virtuous by circumstance
instead of by her own deliberate act, he was too hard-headed not to
realize that never, by the grace of God, would she be above suspicion.
Too well he realized that his parents and his sisters, for whom he
entertained all the affection of a good son and brother, would,
unhampered by sex-appeal and controlled wholly by tradition, fail
utterly to take the same charitable view, even though he was honest
enough with himself to realize that perhaps his own belief in the
matter was largely the result of the wish being father to the thought.

Curiously enough, he dismissed, quite casually, consideration of the
opinions his mother and sisters, their friends and his, the men and
women of Port Agnew might entertain on the subject. His apprehensions
centered almost entirely upon his father. His affection for his father
he had always taken for granted. It was not an emotion to exclaim
over. Now that he realized, for the first time, his