The girl watched him light his cigar and her eyes were full of laughter.

“It’s a real pity women can’t sit themselves behind a cigar,” she said at last, with a pretence of regret.  “It’s the wisest looking thing a man does.  A cigarette kind of makes him seem pleasantly undependable.  A pipe makes you feel he’s full of just everyday notions.  But a cigar!  My!  It sort of dazzles me when I see a man with a big cigar.  I feel like a lowgrade earthworm, don’t you know.  Say,” she cried, with an indescribable gesture of her gloved hands, “he handles that cigar, he sort of fondles it.  He cocks it.  He depresses it.  He rolls it across his lips to the opposite corner of his mouth, and finally blows a thin, thoughtful stream of smoke gently between his pursed lips.  And that stream is immeasurable in its suggestion of wise thought and keen calculation.  I’d say a man’s cigar is his best disguise.”

Bull nodded.

“That’s fine,” he cried.  “But you’ve forgotten the other feller.  The man who ‘chews.’”

Nancy laughed happily.

“Easy,” she cried promptly.  “When he of the bulged cheek gets around just watch your defences.  He’s mostly tough.  He’s on the jump, and hasn’t much fancy for the decencies of life.  The harder he chews the more he’s figgering up his adversary.  And when he spits, get your weapons ready.  When the chewing man succeeds in life I guess he’s dangerous.  And it’s because his force and character have generally lifted him from the bottom of things.”

Bull shook his head in mock despair.

Nancy settled herself back in her chair.

“That’s fixed it.  Guess you’ll need to tell me ‘how.’”

“No, sir,” she cried.  “You can’t go back.  ’The greatest men and women in the world are fools at heart.’  That’s what you said.”

“Yes.  I seem to remember.”

The man stirred and sat up.  He folded the rug more closely about his feet.  Then he turned with a whimsical smile in his eyes.

“Well?” he cried.  “And isn’t it so?  What do we work, and fight, and hate for?  What do we spend our lives worrying to beat the other feller for?  Why do we set our noses into other folks’ affairs and worry them to death to think, and act, and feel the way we do?  And all the while it don’t matter a thing.  Of course we’re fools.  We’ll hand over when the time comes, and the old world’ll roll on, and it’s not been shifted a hair’s-breadth for our having lived, in spite of the obituaries the news-sheets hand out like a Sunday School mam at prize time.  Say, here, it’s no use fooling ourselves.  Life’s one great big thing that don’t take shape by reason of our acts.  What’s the civilisation we love to pat ourselves on the back for?  I’ll tell you.  It’s just a thing we’ve invented, like—­wireless telegraphy, or soap, or steam-heat; and it hands us a cloak to cover up the evil that man and woman’ll never quit doing.  Before we made civilisation