trot down into the Thebaid and
burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it's all too
complex now. You see we've made our dissipations so dainty and
respectable that they've gone further in than the flesh, and taken
hold of the ego proper. You couldn't rest, even here. The war-cry
would follow you."

"You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more
than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the
art of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent
men."

"Naturally," said Wyllis, "since you have decided to marry the most
brilliant talker you know."

Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot
wind through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.

"Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as
interesting as Eric Hermannson?"

"Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian
youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. He has
retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I
fancy."

"Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a
dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the
others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being."

"Well," said Wyllis, meditatively, "I don't read Bourget as much as
my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis, but I fancy
it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted suspicion
that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a soul
somewhere. Nicht wahr?"

"Something like that," said Margaret, thoughtfully, "except that
it's more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless. He has one, and
he makes it known, somehow, without speaking."

"I always have my doubts about loquacious souls," Wyllis remarked,
with the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.

Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. "I knew it from the
first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the
Bernstein boy. That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at will
in anybody. The earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes,
unconsciously. But last night when I sang for him I was doubly sure.
Oh, I haven't told you about that yet! Better light your pipe again.
You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at
that old parlor organ to please Mrs. Lockhart. It's her household
fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of butter she made and