of anything so nasty. The only
fair play for them is to let you alone," Waterlow wound up.

"Ah, they won't do that--they like me too much!" Gaston ingenuously
cried.

"It's an odd way of liking! The best way to show their love will be to
let you marry where your affections, and so many other charming things,
are involved."

"Certainly--only they question the charming things. They feel she
represents, poor little dear, such dangers, such vulgarities, such
possibilities of doing other dreadful things, that it's upon THEM--I
mean on those things--my happiness would be shattered."

"Well," the elder man rather dryly said, "if you yourself have no
secrets for persuading them of the contrary I'm afraid I can't teach you
one."

"Yes, I ought to do it myself," Gaston allowed in the candour of his
meditations. Then he went on in his torment of hesitation: "They never
believed in her from the first. My father was perfectly definite about
it. At heart they never accepted her; they only pretended to do so
because I guaranteed her INSTINCTS--that's what I did, heaven help me!
and that she was incapable of doing a thing that could ever displease
them. Then no sooner was my back turned than she perpetrated that!"

"That was your folly," Waterlow remarked, painting away.

"My folly--to turn my back?"

"No, no--to guarantee."

"My dear fellow, wouldn't you?"--and Gaston stared.

"Never in the world."

"You'd have thought her capable--?"

"Capabilissima! And I shouldn't have cared."

"Do you think her then capable of breaking out again in some new way
that's as bad?"

"I shouldn't care if she was. That's the least of all questions."

"The least?"

"Ah don't you see, wretched youth," cried the artist, pausing from
his work and looking up--"don't you see that the question of her
possibilities is as nothing compared to that of yours? She's the
sweetest young thing I ever saw; but even if she happened not to be I
should still urge you to marry her, in simple self-preservation."

Gaston kept echoing. "In self-preservation?"

"To save from destruction the last scrap of your independence. That's a
much more important matter even than not treating her shabbily. They're
doing their best to kill you morally--to render you incapable of
individual life."

Gaston was immensely struck. "They are--they are!" he declared with
enthusiasm.

"Well then, if you believe it, for heaven's sake go and marry her
to-morrow!" Waterlow