Why, in two days you’d have thought he’d never had another home than the Peters’s.  He helped the old man milk, and had tinkered up the broken kitchen-table, and put in half a dozen window-panes, and was intimate with all the boarders; could give the masons the prices of job-work at the East, and put Stoll the carpenter on the idea of contract houses, out of which he afterward made a fortune.  It was nothing but jokes and fun and shouts of laughter when he was in the house:  even the old man brightened up and told some capital stories.  But from the first I noticed that George’s eye followed Susy watchfully wherever she went, though he was as distant and respectful with her as he was with most women.  He had a curious kind of respect for women, George had.  Even the Slingsbys, that all the men in the theatre joked with, he used to pass by as though they were logs leaning against the wall.  They were the posture-girls, and anything worse besides the name I never saw.

There was a thing happened once on that point which I often thought might have given me a clew to his history if I’d followed it up.  We were playing in one of the best theatres in New York (they brought us into some opera), and the boxes were filled with fine ladies beautifully dressed, or, I might say, half dressed.

George was in one of the wings.  “It’s a pretty sight,” I said to him.

“It’s a shameful sight,” he said with an oath.  “The Slingsbys do it for their living, but these women—­”

I said they were ladies, and ought to be treated with respect.  I was amazed at the heat he was in.

“I had a sister, Zack, and there’s where I learned what a woman should be.”

“I never heard of your sister, George,” said I. I knew he would not have spoken of her but for the heat he was in.

“No.  I’m as dead to her, being what I am, as if I were six feet under ground.”

I turned and looked at him, and when I saw his face I said no more, and I never spoke of it again.  It was something neither I nor any other man had any business with.

So, when I saw how he was touched by Susy and drawn toward her, it raised her in my opinion, though I’d seen myself how pretty and sensible a little body she was.  But I was sorry, for I knew twan’t no use.  The Peterses were Methodists, and Susy more strict than any of them; and I saw she looked on the theatre as the gate of hell, and George and me swinging over it.

I don’t think, though, that George saw how strong her feeling about it was, for after we’d been there a week or two he began to ask her to go and see us perform, if only for once.  I believe he thought the girl would come to love him if she saw him at his best.  I don’t wonder at it, sir.  I’ve seen those pictures and statues they’ve made of the old gods, and I reckon they put in them the best they thought a man could be; but I never knew what real manhood was until I saw my partner when he stood quiet on the stage waiting the signal to begin the light full on his keen blue eyes, the gold-worked velvet tunic, and his perfect figure.