r in over-sexing--"

"I have sometimes thought so. The over-masculine man is too brutal."

"And the over-feminine woman?"

"Kindly, sentimental, helpless and weak. I have lived with such an
aunt since I was fifteen. No, I beg of you, do not misunderstand me!
I blame nothing upon her. Like many good women whose minds are blocked
off in conventional squares, she is very loyal and sympathetic--and
very trying. The essence of her temperament is ineffectuality. My
cousin and I were a wild, unmanageable pair who rode roughshod over
protest. That Aunt Agatha was not in fault may be proved by my cousin.
She is a fine, true, splendid woman."

An ineffectual aunt in the critical years of adolescence! Mic-co did
not suggest that his cousin's sex had been her salvation.

So nights by the pool Mic-co plumbed the depths of his young guest with
the fine, tired eyes.

"Tell me," he said gently another night; "this inordinate sensitiveness
of which you speak. To what do you attribute it?"

Carl colored.

"My mother," he said, "was courageous and unconventional. She
recognized the fact that marriage and monogamy are not the ethical
answers of the future--that though ideal unions sometimes result, it is
not because of marriage, but in spite of it--that motherhood is the
inalienable right of every woman with the divine spark in her heart, no
matter what the disappointing lack of desirable marriage chances in her
life may be. Therefore, when the years failed to produce her perfect
and desirable human complement, she sought a eugenic mate and bore me,
refusing to saddle herself to a meaningless, man-made partnership with
infinite possibilities of domestic hell in it, merely as a sop to the
world-Cerberus of convention. Marriage could have added nothing to her
lofty conceptions of motherhood--but I--I have been keenly resentful
and sensitive--for her. I think it has been the feeling that no one
understood. Then, after she died, there was no one--only Philip. I
saw him rarely."

"And your cousin?"

"She had been taught--to misunderstand. There was always that barrier.
And she is very high spirited. Though we were much together as
youngsters she could not forget."

A singular maternal history, a beautiful, high-spirited, intolerant
cousin who had been taught to despise his mother's morality! What
warring forces indeed had gone to the making of this man before him.

"You have been lonely?"

"Yes," said Carl. "