himself the luckiest of mortals. A young man with more passion
or imagination might have deplored the lack of romance in the
betrothal. He might have desired on the part of the maiden either more
shyness, delicacy, and elusiveness, or more resonant emotion. The
finer tendrils of his being might have shivered, ready to shrivel, as
at a touch of frost, in the cool ironical atmosphere which the girl
had created around her. But Doggie was not such a young man. Such
passions as heredity had endowed him with had been drugged by
training. No tales of immortal love had ever fired his blood. Once,
somewhere abroad, the unprincipled McPhail found him reading _Manon
Lescaut_--he had bought a cheap copy haphazard--and taking the
delectable volume out of his hands, asked him what he thought of it.

"It's like reading about a lunatic," replied the bewildered Doggie.
"Do such people as Des Grieux exist?"

"Ay, laddie," replied McPhail, greatly relieved. "Your acumen has
pierced to the root of the matter. They do exist, but nowadays we put
them into asylums. We must excuse the author for living in the
psychological obscurity of the eighteenth century. It's just a silly,
rotten book."

"I'm glad you're of the same opinion as myself," said Doggie, and
thought no more of the absurd but deathless pair of lovers. The
unprincipled McPhail, not without pawky humour, immediately gave him
_Paul et Virginie_, which Doggie, after reading it, thought the truest
and most beautiful story in the world. Even in later years, when his
intelligence had ripened and his sphere of reading expanded, he looked
upon the passion of a Romeo or an Othello as a conventional peg on
which the poet hung his imagery, but having no more relation to real
life as it is lived by human beings than the blood-lust of the
half-man, half-bull Minotaur, or the uncomfortable riding conversation
of the Valkyrie.

So Doggie Trevor went home perfectly contented with himself, with
Peggy Conover, with his Uncle and Aunt, of whom hitherto he had been
just a little bit afraid, with Fortune, with Fate, with his house,
with his peacock and ivory room, with a great clump of typescript and
a mass of coloured proof-prints, which represented a third of his
projected history of wall-papers, with his feather-bed, with Goliath,
his almost microscopic Belgian griffon, with a set of Nile-green silk
underwear that had just come from his outfitters in London, with his
new Rolls-Royce car and