pathetic task of
managing his horse, he had enjoyed like a boy, and during the ride had
thought of nothing but the physical delight of the open air and the
motion.

"Yes," he returned to his friend's remark, "as far as any point of
interest goes, we may grant you that we began as men. I mean to say
that monkeys aren't useful in one's deductions for emotional
hypotheses, at any rate. I'll grant you for our use that we were men
to begin with."

"Damn it all," said his host, "aren't we just as much so to-day, for
all our civilization?"

"Well, we don't primarily knock on the head a woman whose physique has
pleased us, and carry her off while she's unconscious."

"It might in some cases be a good thing if we did," Westboro' growled.

Bulstrode ran his hand along the silky neck of his horse, from whose
nostrils smoke came in little puffs that met the moisture of the air.

"Oh, we're not, you know, so awfully far away from our instincts in
anything, old man! There isn't any cast-iron rule about feelings.
They depend on the individual."

"Oh, you've never married," Westboro' tried frankly to irritate him,
"and you can't, you know----"

The sweet temper of the other accepted the Duke's scorn. "I'm not
married, or very theoretical about it, either. One can only, after
all, have his own point of view."

"We're not, I expect, fair to the women," the Duke generously
acknowledged. "We look for so much in them. We expect them to be so
much."

"A wife," Bulstrode completed for him, "a mother, a friend."

And Westboro' finished it. "For them and for other men. And a
mistress."

And here Bulstrode took him up for the first time with a note of
challenge in his voice.

"And what, my dear man, did you intend that the Duchess should take you
for? No, I mean to say, quite man to man, given that any woman could
or does contain all the qualities you so temperately ask?"

Westboro' smiled at the first curtness he had ever heard in his
friend's voice.

"Oh, you know, we men don't fuss about ourselves."

"You married her at eighteen," Bulstrode said. "You made her a
Duchess. You had already lived a life and she was a child beside you
in experience. You required motherhood of her, and in return...."

"Well," Westboro' turned about in his saddle and faced his earnest
friend. "What then, in your opinion, might I have been?"

"You might have been from the start," Bulstrode said it shortly, "a
lover. It's not a