up, they were quite overpowering. During his
two years in the army he had drifted into the easy habits and easier
vernacular of the enlisted man. Whatever knowledge he had of the
amenities of life had almost been forgotten. But, though his social
virtues were few, he passionately identified himself with them rather
than with his faults, which were many. To prove his politeness, for
instance, he insisted upon his hostesses having second helps to every
dish, offered to answer the telephone whenever it rang, and even
obligingly started to answer the door-bell during the salad course.

That dinner was but the initiation into a week of difficult adjustments.
When he was not in the arctic region surrounding Miss Isobel and Miss
Enid, he was in the torrid zone of Madam's presence. New and embarrassing
situations confronted him on every hand, and when he was not breaking
conventions he was breaking china. But Quin was not sensitive, and, in
spite of the fact that he was being silently or vocally condemned most of
the time, he cheerfully persevered in his determination to win the
respect of the family.

The saving of his ignorance was that he never tried to conceal it. He
looked at it with surprise and discussed it with disconcerting frankness.
He was no more abashed in learning new and better ways of conducting
himself than he would have been in learning a new language. He laughed
good-humoredly at his mistakes and seldom committed the same one a second
time. His limitations were to him like the frontier to a pioneer--a thing
to be reached and crossed.

If only he could have contented himself with performing the one duty
required of him and then gracefully effacing himself, his success would
have been assured. But that was not Quin's nature. Having identified
himself with the family, he promptly assumed full responsibility for its
welfare. By the end of the second week he was the self-constituted head
of the establishment. No mission was too high or too low for him to
volunteer to perform. One moment he was tactfully severing diplomatic
relations with a consulting physician in the front hall, the next he was
firing the furnace in the basement. Whenever he was in the house he was
meeting emergencies and adjusting difficulties, upsetting established
customs and often achieving unexpected results with new ones.

Miss Isobel and Miss Enid stood aghast at his temerity, and waited hourly
for the lightning of Madam's wrath to annih