the bank, and better there than in ladies’ hats.  I wonder if I would be a fool if I had the money?—­if I would wear dead things on my head?  But indeed there are ways I think I would always be nice, however rich I was—­ways that don’t affect me very much, so that they’re no sacrifice.  And he’s seen lots of things.  Sloths, which I always thought were just metaphors.  And ant-eaters, and alligators, and jaguars.  And—­”

“If you go to London,” said Mr. Mactavish James, “you’ll be losing your heart to a keeper at the Zoo.”

“Who’s losing their heart to anybody?” she asked peevishly.  “And you needn’t sneer.  He’s done lots else besides just seeing animals.  Once he steered a ship in the South Seas for two days and two nights when the crew were down with the New Guinea fever.  And another time he was working at a mine in Andalusia.  The miners went on strike.  He and some other men put up barricades and took guns.  They defended the place.  He is the first man I have ever known who did such things.  And they come natural to him.  He thinks no more of them than your son,” she said nastily, “thinks of playing a round on the Gullane links.”

“Imphm.  I wonder what he’s been doing traiking about like this.  Rolling stones gather no moss, I’ve heard.”

Her eyes blazed, then narrowed.  “Oh, make no mistake!  He earns a lot of money.  He can beat you even at your own game.”

Mr. Mactavish James tee-heed, but did not like it, for she was looking round the room as if it were a hated prison and all that was done in it contemptible; and these things were his life.  “Well, you know best.  And what’s this paragon like?  I’ve not seen the fellow.”

“He’s a lovely pairson,” she said sullenly.

He began to loathe these two young people, who were all that he and his stock could not be, who were going to do the things his age could not do.  “Ah, well!  Ah, well!” he sighed, with a spurious shrewd melancholy.  “He’ll be like me when he’s old, Ellen; all old men are alike.”

She looked at him coldly and said, “He will not.”

Her brows were heavy and the hand she held at her bosom was clenched.  The rain was beating on the window-panes.  The fire seemed diluted by the day’s dampness; and there was a chill spreading through his mind as if they had been debating fundamental things and the argument had turned unanswerably to his disadvantage.  He twisted in his seat and looked sharply at her, and though the mirror of his mind was apt to tilt away from the disagreeable, he perceived that she was regarding him and the prudent destiny he had chosen with a scorn more unappeasable than any appetite; and that the destiny she was choosing with this snarling intensity was so glorious that it justified her scorn.  He felt a conviction, which had the vague quality of melancholy, that he was morally insolvent, and a suspicion, which had the acute quality of pain, that his financial solvency was not such a great thing