understood what was too complex to put in words. He was an old man now,
and it was permitted him to express thus the compulsion of Adelle's rare
loveliness, thus to confide to her the sympathy of his own dreaming
heart. The little ungloved hand lay within his old hand, warm and
passive, not clinging, content to rest there in peace.

Thus they jogged back to the city, all three silent, occupied with
personal thoughts suggested by their expedition this fine May morning
into Clark's Field, which the judge for one felt had been thoroughly
successful.

* * * * *

Judge Orcutt kept the two cousins to luncheon, and when Adelle had gone
with his housekeeper to lay aside her hat and wraps, he was left alone
with the young stone mason. After long years of watching human beings
from the bench, the judge formed his opinions of people rapidly and was
rarely mistaken upon the essential quality of any one. He liked Tom
Clark. He did not mind, as much as Adelle did, his spitting habit, for
he remembered the time not more than a generation or two ago when the
best American gentlemen chewed tobacco or took snuff, and he could see
quality in a person who spat upon the ground, but did not conceal ugly
and vile thoughts, or who abused the language of books in favor of that
more enduring vernacular of the street, or who confused the table
implements, or did the hundred and one other little things that are
supposedly the indelible marks of an inferior culture. A most fastidious
person himself, as was obvious, he looked in others for a fastidiousness
of spirit rather than for a correct performance of the whims of
refinement. For the one, as everybody knows but forgets, is eternal, and
the other is merely transitory--the most transitory aspect of human
beings, their manners. He was pleased with Tom Clark's vigorous reaction
against the East in favor of his own freer land, his disgust with the
incipient squalor of Clark's Field, and his honest scorn for a
civilization that would permit human beings to live as they lived there
and generally in the more crowded industrial centers of the world. What
the stone mason had recklessly vaunted to Adelle as "anarchism," the
judge recognized as a healthy reaction against unworthy human
institutions,--the idiom in him of youth and hope and will. And he could
understand, now that he was face to face with the vigorous young man,
the reason why Adelle had been drawn to the ston