“I hope you will answer my cousin’s letter.  I can’t tell you what a good man he is, and so boyish, in spite of his being strong and perfectly brave—­oh, brave to the death!  He’s very lonely.  He always has been.  You’ll have to make allowances for his being so Western and going right to the point in such a reckless way.  He hasn’t told me what he’s written you, but I know if he wants to be friends with you he’ll say so without any preliminaries.  He’s very eager to have me talk of you, so I do.  I’m eager to talk, too.  I always loved you, Kate, but now I put you and Karl in a class by yourselves as the completely dependable ones.

“The babies send kisses.  Don’t worry about me.  I’m beginning to see that it’s not extraordinary for trouble to have come to me.  Why not to me as well as to another?  I’m one of the great company of sad ones now.  But I’m not going to be melancholy.  I know how disappointed you’d be if I were.  I’m beginning to sleep better, and for all of this still, dark cavern in my heart, so filled with voices of the past and with the horrible chill of the present, I am able to laugh a little at passing things.  I find myself doing it involuntarily.  So at least I’ve got where I can hear what the people about me are saying, and can make a fitting reply.  Yes, do write Karl.  For my sake.”

XXI

Meantime, Ray McCrea had neglected to take his summer vacation.  He was staying in the city, and twice a week he called on Kate.  Kate liked him neither more nor less than at the beginning.  He was clever and he was kind, and it was his delight to make her happy.  But it was with the surface of her understanding that she listened to him and the skimmings of her thoughts that she passed to him.  He had that light, acrid accent of well-to-do American men.  Reasonably contented himself, he failed to see why every one else should not be so, too.  He was not religious for the same reason that he was not irreligious—­because it seemed to him useless to think about such matters.  Public affairs and politics failed to interest him because he believed that the country was in the hands of a mob and that the “grafters would run things anyway.”  He called eloquence spell-binding, and sentiment slush,—­sentiment, that is, in books and on the stage,—­and he was indulgently inclined to suspect that there was something “in it” for whoever appeared to be essaying a benevolent enterprise.  Respectable, liberal-handed, habitually amused, slightly caustic, he looked out for the good of himself and those related to him and considered that he was justified in closing his corporate regards at that point.  He had no cant and no hypocrisy, no pose and no fads.  A sane, aggressive, self-centered, rational materialist of the American brand, it was not only his friends who thought him a fine fellow.  He himself would have admitted so much and have been perfectly justified in so doing.