“I don’t know,” sighed Lispenard.  “I’m not prepared to say it isn’t so.  Indeed, after seeing Peter, who never seemed able to understand women till this one appeared on the scene, develop into a regulation lover, I am quite prepared to believe that every one knows more than I do.  At the same time, I can’t afford to risk my reputation for discrimination and insight over such a simple thing as Peter’s character.  You’ve all tried to say what Peter is.  Now I’ll tell you in two words and you’ll all find you are right, and you’ll all find you are wrong.”

“You are as bad as Leonore,” cried Dorothy.

“Well,” said Watts, “we are all listening.  What is Peter?”

“He is an extreme type of a man far from uncommon in this country, yet who has never been understood by foreigners, and by few Americans.”

“Well?”

“Peter is a practical idealist”

CHAPTER LXI.

LEONORE’S THEORY.

And how well had that “talk-it-over” group at the end of Peters wedding-day grasped his character?  How clearly do we ever gain an insight into the feelings and motives which induce conduct even in those whom we best know and love?  Each had found something in Peter that no other had discovered.  We speak of rose-colored glasses, and Shakespeare wrote, “All things are yellow to a jaundiced eye.”  When we take a bit of blue glass, and place it with yellow, it becomes green.  When we put it with red, it becomes purple.  Yet blue it is all the time.  Is not each person responsible for the tint he seems to produce in others?  Can we ever learn that the thing is blue, and that the green or purple aspect is only the tinge which we ourselves help to give?  Can we ever learn that we love and are loved entirely as we give ourselves colors which may harmonize with those about us?  That love, wins love; kindness, kindness; hate, hate.  That just such elements as we give to the individual, the individual gives back to us?  That the sides we show are the sides seen by the world.  There were people who could truly believe that Peter was a ward boss; a frequenter of saloons; a drunkard; a liar; a swearer; a murderer, in intention, if not in act; a profligate; and a compromiser of many of his own strongest principles.  Yet there were people who could, say other things of him.

But more important than the opinion of Peter’s friends, and of the world, was the opinion of Peter’s wife.  Was she right in her theory that she was the only one who understood him?  Or had she, as he had once done, reared an ideal, and given that ideal the love which she supposed she was giving Peter?  It is always a problem in love to say whether we love people most for the qualities they actually possess, or for those with which our own love endows them.  Here was a young girl, inexperienced in world and men, joyfully sinking her own life in that of a man whom, but a few months before, had been only a matter