can't think of nothing but her--war isn't much; shackles on four
millions slaves--no consequence; the Colonel caught us kissing in his
tent the day I left for the army; union forever--mere circumstance in
the lives of two crazy people--in a world mostly eyes and lips and soft
hands and whispers and flowers, eh--and--" The Captain does not finish
his sentence.

He rises, puts his apple core on the table, and says after a great sigh:
"And so we bloomed and blossomed and come to fruit and dried up and
blowed away, and here they are--all the rest of 'em--ready to bloom--and
may God help 'em and keep 'em." He pauses, "Help 'em and keep 'em and
when they have dried up and blowed away--let 'em remember the perfume
clean to the end!" He turns away from the girls, wipes his eyes with his
gnarled fingers, and after clearing his throat says: "Well, girls, how
about hash for breakfast--what say?"

The wheels of the Judge's buggy grate upon the curbing nearby and the
Captain remarks: "Judge Tom gets in a little later every night now. I
heard him dump her in at eight, and here it is nearly eleven--pretty
careless,--pretty careless; he oughtn't to be getting in this late for
four or five years yet--what say?" Public opinion again is divided.
Fashion and the fine arts hold that it is Margaret's fault and that she
is growing to be too much of a poseur; but the schools, which are the
bulwarks of our liberties, maintain that he is just as bad as she. And
what is more to the point--such is the contention of the eldest Miss
Morton of the fourth grade in the Lincoln school, he has driven around
to the school twice this spring to take little Lila out riding, and even
though her mother has told the teachers to let the child go if she cared
to, the little girl would not go and he was mean to the principal and
insolent, though Heaven knows it is not the principal's fault, and if
the janitor hadn't been standing right there--but it really makes little
difference what would have happened; for the janitor in every school
building, as every one knows, is a fierce and awesome creature who keeps
more dreadful things from happening that never would have happened than
any other single agency in the world.

The point which the eldest Miss Morton was accenting was this, that he
should have thought of Lila before he got his divorce.

Now the worlds of fashion and the fine arts and the schools themselves,
bulwarks that they are, do not realize how keenly