He astonished me, this ardent, ideal, troubled boy; so innocent regarding the glaring facts of our new prosperity, so finely penetrating as to some of the mysteries of the soul.  But he was of old Huguenot blood, and of careful and gentle upbringing; and it was delightful to find such a young man left upon our American soil untainted by the present fashionable idolatries.

“I bow to your creed of ‘moral elegance,’” I cried.  “It never dies.  It has outlasted all the mobs and all the religions.”

“They seemed to think,” he continued, pursuing his Newport train of thought, “that to prove you were a dead game sport you must behave like—­ behave like—­”

“Like a herd of swine,” I suggested.

He was merry.  “Ah, if they only would—­completely!”

“Completely what?”

“Behave so.  Rush over a steep place into the sea.”

We sat in the quiet relish of his Scriptural idea, and the western crimson and the twilight began to come and mingle with the perfumes.  John Mayrant’s face changed from its vivacity to a sort of pensive wistfulness, which, for all the dash and spirit in his delicate features, was somehow the final thing one got from the boy’s expression.  It was as though the noble memories of his race looked out of his eyes, seeking new chances for distinction, and found instead a soil laid waste, an empty fatherland, a people benumbed past rousing.  Had he not said, “Poor Kings Port!” as he tapped the gravestone?  Moral elegance could scarcely permit a sigh more direct.

“I am glad that you believe it never dies,” he resumed.  “And I am glad to find somebody to—­talk to, you know.  My friends here are everything friends and gentlemen should be, but they don’t—­I suppose it’s because they have not had my special experiences.”

I sat waiting for the boy to go on with it.  How plainly he was telling me of his “special experiences”!  He and his creed were not merely in revolt against the herd of swine; there would be nothing special in that; I had met people before who were that; but he was tied by honor, and soon to be tied by the formidable nuptial knot, to a specimen devotee of the cult.  He shouldn’t marry her if he really did not want to, and I could stop it!  But how was I to begin spinning the first faint web of plan how I might stop it, unless he came right out with the whole thing?  I didn’t believe he was the man to do that ever, even under the loosening inspiration of drink.  In wine lies truth, no doubt; but within him, was not moral elegance the bottom truth that would, even in his cups, keep him a gentleman, and control all such revelations?  He might smash the glasses, but he would not speak of his misgivings as to Hortense Rieppe.

He began again, “Nor do I believe that a really nice girl would continue to think as those few do, if she once got safe away from them.  Why, my dear sir,” he stretched out his hand in emphasis, “you do not have to do anything untimely and extreme if you are in good earnest a dead game sport.  The time comes, and you meet the occasion as the duck swims.  There was one of them—­the right kind.”