he couldn't
alter--as a form of wild and stimulating torment.

So you can imagine that in some ways the judge's house was a pretty
difficult house to go to. I mean you can see how awfully hard it must
have been for Mr. Pupkin. I tell you it took some nerve to step up on
that piazza and say, in a perfectly natural, off-hand way: "Oh, how
do you do, judge? Is Miss Zena in? No, I won't stay, thanks; I think I
ought to be going. I simply called." A man who can do that has got to
have a pretty fair amount of savoir what do you call it, and he's got to
be mighty well shaved and have his cameo pin put in his tie at a pretty
undeniable angle before he can tackle it. Yes, and even then he may need
to hang round behind the lilac bushes for half an hour first, and cool
off. And he's apt to make pretty good time down Oneida Street on the way
back.

Still, that's what you call love, and if you've got it, and are well
shaved, and your boots well blacked, you can do things that seem almost
impossible. Yes, you can do anything, even if you do trip over the dog
in getting off the piazza.

Don't suppose for a moment that Judge Pepperleigh was an unapproachable
or a harsh man always and to everybody. Even Mr. Pupkin had to admit
that that couldn't be so. To know that, you had only to see Zena
Pepperleigh put her arm round his neck and call him Daddy. She would do
that even when there were two or three young men sitting on the edge of
the piazza. You know, I think, the way they sit on the edge in Mariposa.
It is meant to indicate what part of the family they have come to see.
Thus when George Duff, the bank manager, came up to the Pepperleigh
house, he always sat in a chair on the verandah and talked to the judge.
But when Pupkin or Mallory Tompkins or any fellow like that came, he sat
down in a sidelong fashion on the edge of the boards and then they knew
exactly what he was there for. If he knew the house well, he leaned his
back against the verandah post and smoked a cigarette. But that took
nerve.

But I am afraid that this is a digression, and, of course, you know all
about it just as well as I do. All that I was trying to say was that I
don't suppose that the judge had ever spoken a cross word to Zena in his
life.--Oh, he threw her novel over the grape-vine, I don't deny that,
but then why on earth should a girl read trash like the Errant Quest of
the Palladin Pilgrim, and the Life of Sir Galahad, when the house was
full of goo