“I really don’t object to platitudes,” he told Ruth later; “but what worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent, superior certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken to do it.  Why, I could give that man the whole history of the Reformation in the time he took to tell me that the Union-Labor Party had fused with the Democrats.  Do you know, he skins his words as a professional poker-player skins the cards that are dealt out to him.  Some day I’ll show you what I mean.”

“I’m sorry you don’t like him,” was her reply.  “He’s a favorite of Mr. Butler’s.  Mr. Butler says he is safe and honest—­calls him the Rock, Peter, and says that upon him any banking institution can well be built.”

“I don’t doubt it—­from the little I saw of him and the less I heard from him; but I don’t think so much of banks as I did.  You don’t mind my speaking my mind this way, dear?”

“No, no; it is most interesting.”

“Yes,” Martin went on heartily, “I’m no more than a barbarian getting my first impressions of civilization.  Such impressions must be entertainingly novel to the civilized person.”

“What did you think of my cousins?” Ruth queried.

“I liked them better than the other women.  There’s plenty of fun in them along with paucity of pretence.”

“Then you did like the other women?”

He shook his head.

“That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological poll-parrot.  I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like Tomlinson, there would be found in her not one original thought.  As for the portrait-painter, she was a positive bore.  She’d make a good wife for the cashier.  And the musician woman!  I don’t care how nimble her fingers are, how perfect her technique, how wonderful her expression—­the fact is, she knows nothing about music.”

“She plays beautifully,” Ruth protested.

“Yes, she’s undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but the intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her.  I asked her what music meant to her—­you know I’m always curious to know that particular thing; and she did not know what it meant to her, except that she adored it, that it was the greatest of the arts, and that it meant more than life to her.”

“You were making them talk shop,” Ruth charged him.

“I confess it.  And if they were failures on shop, imagine my sufferings if they had discoursed on other subjects.  Why, I used to think that up here, where all the advantages of culture were enjoyed—­” He paused for a moment, and watched the youthful shade of himself, in stiff-rim and square-cut, enter the door and swagger across the room.  “As I was saying, up here I thought all men and women were brilliant and radiant.  But now, from what little I’ve seen of them, they strike me as a pack of ninnies, most of them, and ninety percent of the remainder as bores.  Now there’s Professor Caldwell—­he’s different.  He’s a man, every inch of him and every atom of his gray matter.”