es."

"How did he take it?"

"He did not seem to care."

"There you are, just as I said. We've got to get him to care. We've
got to make him take up the harp of life and go twanging it again.
That's the job. He's young and sound. Of course, there'll be a few
kinks to straighten out. He's passed through some rough mental
torture. But one of these days everything will click back into
place. Great sport, eh? To haul them back from the ragged edge.
Wouldn't it be fun to see his name on a book-cover some day? He'll
go strutting up and down without ever dreaming he owed the whole
shot to us. That would be fun, eh?"

"I wonder if you know how kind you are? You are like somebody out
of a book."

"There, now! You mustn't get mixed. You mustn't go by what you read
so much as by what you see and hear. You must remember, you've just
begun to read; you haven't any comparisons. You mustn't go dressing
up Tom, Dick, and Harry in Henry Esmond's ruffles. What you want to
do is to imagine every woman a Becky Sharp and every man a Rawdon
Crawley."

"I know what is good," she replied.

"Yes; but what is good isn't always proper. And so, here we are,
right back from where we started. But no more of that. Let's talk
of this chap. There's good stuff in him, if one could find the way
to dig it out. But pathologically, he is still on the edge. Unless
we can get some optimism into him, he'll probably start this all
over again when he gets on his feet. That's the way it goes. But
between us, we'll have him writing books some day. That's one of
the troubles with young folks: they take themselves so seriously.
He probably imagines himself to be a thousand times worse off than
he actually is. Youth finds it pleasant sometimes to be melancholy.
Disappointed puppy-love, and all that."

"Puppy-love."

"A young fellow who thinks he's in love, when he has only been
reading too much."

"Do girls have puppy-love?"

"Land sakes, yes! On the average they are worse than the boys. A
boy can forget his amatory troubles playing baseball; but a girl
can't find any particular distraction in doing fancy work. Do you
know, I envy you. All the world before you, all the ologies. What
an adventure! Of course, you'll bark your shins here and there and
hit your funnybone; but the newness of everything will be something
of a compensation. All right. Let's get one idea into our heads. We
are going to have this chap writing books one of these days."

Idea