"There aren't many couples like them," Harry agreed wistfully. "But I
bet even you and I had it in us to be decent and faithful if we'd ever
struck the right girl. Those things are the purest luck, and we've
been unlucky. But it makes me sick to be as old as we are, and no
nearer _home_ than the day we left college."
"When that baby was asleep in my lap--did I tell you about that?"
"Twice," said Harry mournfully.
I didn't believe him, and related the episode again. "It was
wonderful," I said; "she was like a little stove with a fire in it.
She made me feel so trusted and tender that I could have put back my
head and bawled like a wolf. Think of having babies like that for your
very own, and a wife like Lucy Fulton thrown in."
"She could have married most anybody," said Harry, "but she took a poor
man and a rank outsider because she--hic--loved him. That's the kind
of girl she is! Why nobody ever thought she'd settle to anybody. I
bet she broke her word to half a dozen men, before she gave it to
Fulton and kept it."
"I wouldn't call him exactly an outsider," I said; "anyway she's made
an insider of him. Everybody likes him, and admires him. I never
thought much of him at school, but I think he's a peach now. And he
understands everything you say to him."
"He understands a good deal more than we'll ever be able to say to him.
_He's_ got brains. Evelyn Gray is staying with them."
"I know she is. I dined there last night. She's looking very pretty."
"She _is_ pretty," said Harry, "and she's got pretty hands and feet;
most pretty women haven't. It's usually the woman with a face that
would stop a clock that has pretty feet."
"Like Mrs. Deering," I suggested.
"Exactly," he said. "But Deering is no fool."
"How do you mean he isn't a fool?"
"Why," said Harry, "he makes her sleep with her feet on the pillow."
This struck me as very funny, and I laughed until I had forgotten what
I was laughing at. Harry got laughing, too, after a while. He put his
whole soul in it. Then we ordered two bottles of ale and had some fat
wood put on the fire, and watched it roar and sputter with flame as
only fat wood can. After much meditation and a swallow of the
fresh-brought ale, my mind began to harp on Evelyn Gray, and to magnify
her good looks and attractions. So I said:
"Harry, why don't _you_ marry Evelyn?"
For a moment he scowled at the fire. Then he spoke in a bitter voice.
"Suppose _I_ wanted to, and _she_ wanted to," he said, "still we
couldn't."
"Why not?" I asked innocently, expecting, I think, that his phrase was
some sort of a conundrum.
"Why, Archie, my boy," he said, and his scowl faded to a look of
weariness and disgust, "it looks as if I might have to marry somebody
else."
"Not----?"