“The capacity, boy, for the grande passion.  Odd that it should exist in so light a vessel, but these are the secrets of Nature!  There are moments, you know, when this little Jacqueline isn’t laughing at life—­rare, I admit, but still existent—­and then you see that the corners of her mouth can droop.  She may live to find existence void, but she’ll never live to find it shallow.  Thanks, boy!” He took his cup of coffee, and, walking to the table, cut a slice of bread, which he carried back to the fire.  “Now, don’t say a word!  I’m going to make you the finest bit of toast you ever saw in your life!”

Max, preserving the required silence, watched him make the toast, carefully balancing the bread on the tip of a knife, carefully browning, carefully buttering it.

“Now!  Taste that, and tell me if there wasn’t a great chef lost in me!”

He carried the toast back to the fire and watched Max eat the first morsel.

“Nice?”

“Delicious!”

“Ah!  Then it’s all fair sailing!  I’ll cut myself a bit of bread and sit down on my heels like you.  There’s something in that Turkish idea, after all!  But, as I was saying”—­he buttered his bread and dropped into position beside the boy—­“as I was saying awhile ago, that child next door, with all her innocent air and her blue eyes, has climbed the slippery stairs and reached the seventh heaven.  And not only reached it herself, mind you, but dragged that ungainly Cartel with her by the tip of her tiny finger!  Wonderful!  Wonderful!  Enviable fate!”

Max’s eyes laughed.  “M.  Cartel’s?”

“M.  Cartel’s.  Oh, boy, that seventh heaven!  Those slippery steps!”

“And the tip of a tiny finger?” Max was jesting; but Blake, lost in his own musings, did not perceive it.

“For Cartel—­yes!” he said.  “For me, no!  I think I’d like the whole hand.”

Here Max picked up a tongs and stirred the logs until they blazed.

“Absurd!” he said.  “The tip of a finger or the whole of a hand, it is all the same!  It is a mistake, this love!  That old story of the Garden and the Serpent is as true as truth.  Man and Woman were content to live and adorn the world until one day they espied the stupid red Apple—­and straightway they must eat!  Look even at this Cartel!  He is an artist; he might make the world listen to his music.  But, no!  He sees a little butterfly, as you call her—­all blonde and blue—­and down falls his ambition, and up go his eyes to the sky, and henceforth he is content to fiddle to himself and to the stars!  Oh, my patience leaves me!” Again he struck the logs, and a golden shower of sparks flew up the chimney.

“I don’t know!” said Blake, placidly.  “I’m not so sure that he isn’t getting the best of it, when all’s said and done!”

Max reddened.  “You make me angry with this ‘I do not know!’ and ’I am not so sure!’ The matter is like day.  You cannot submerge your personality and yet retain it.”