“A lot of priceless things aren’t pretty.  I don’t ever expect to be a culturated person.  Mother makes me go to all those old galleries and museums, when we’re in Europe, and look at a lot of cracked pictures and broken statues and carved things, and wants me to think they’re beautiful, but I don’t.  Some of them are hideous, and I get so tired of being told I must admire them that I make a face inside at most of them as I walk along, though, of course, outside, for mother’s sake, I don’t make any signs.  I’m a great disappointment to mother.  We had a lady artist guide the last time we were in Italy.  She used to get so mad with me that once she shook me.  Father would have killed her if she hadn’t been a lady, and after that he and I used to go out by ourselves and have the grandest times.  He’d show me just a few pictures at the time, and tell me all about them, and some of them I just loved.  Mother says you have so many beautiful things, Uncle Winthrop, and that it’s a shame for a man to have them all by himself.”  She looked around the large room, and again took her seat in her uncle’s lap.  “Some things I like in here, and some I don’t.  You’ve got an awful lot of books, haven’t you?”

“Too many, I’m afraid.  Would you mind if I smoked?” Laine reached for a cigar from the box on the table and held it between his fingers.

“May I?”

“Of course.  I hope I won’t forget, though, and kiss you.  I’m so apt to when I’m talking, if I like a person.  Tobacco is so bitter.  I’ll tell you what I think is the matter with this room.  It’s—­it’s—­” She looked around carefully.  “It’s something that isn’t in it.  I don’t know what it is.  Why don’t you get married, Uncle Winthrop?  Maybe your wife would know.”

Laine put the unlighted cigar back on the table, and Dorothea’s hands, which were stroking one of his, were gripped by it and held tightly.

“I do not doubt it.  The trouble is in getting the wife.”

Dorothea sat upright.  “The idea!  I heard Miss Robin French say the other day the way unmarried men were run after was outrageous, and all they had to do was to stand still and crow a little, and up would come a-clucking all kinds of hens, little ones and big ones, and young ones and old ones, and—­ Don’t you tell anybody, but I think she’d come, too!” Dorothea’s hands came together, and she laughed gleefully.  “Father says if Miss Robin would give up hoping she’d be happier.”  Suddenly her face sobered.  “Do all ladies try to marry a man, Uncle Winthrop?”

“They most certainly do not.”  Laine smiled in Dorothea’s face, and before the child’s clear eyes his own, full of weary pain, turned away.  “Many of them take very long to make up their minds to marry at all.”

“Have you ever asked one to marry you?”

Laine did not answer.  Dorothea’s question was unheard.  His thoughts were elsewhere.

“Have you?”