After a moment she resumed:  “I wish she could have loved him in the way we wish.  Marriage is a terrible risk for a girl like her.  She is too straightforward, too uncompromisingly intolerant of every-day littleness, to have a very peaceful life.  She has grown up so different from other girls; so full of ideals and romance; she belongs, in thought and motives, to the last century rather than to this, if what I hear be true.  She is large-hearted and has a great capacity for affection, but she is self-willed and she could be hard upon occasion.  If she should fall into weak or wicked hands she would both endure and inflict untold suffering.  And there is within her, too, endless power of generosity and self-sacrifice.  Poor child! with Jim I could have trusted her; but she couldn’t love him, so there’s nothing to be done.”

“Why couldn’t she?” demanded Berkeley, argumentatively.  “She’ll never do any better; Jim’s a handsome fellow, as men go, brave, honorable and sweet-tempered.  What more does she want?  It looks to me like sheer perversity.”

Mrs. Mason smiled indulgently at her son’s masculine obtuseness.  The subtleties of women were so far beyond his comprehension that it was hardly worth while to endeavor to make him understand.  She made the effort, however, despite its uselessness.

“It isn’t perversity, Berkeley,” she said; “I hardly realize, myself, why the thing should have seemed so impossible.  I suppose, having always regarded Jim as a kindly old playmate, and big, brotherly friend, the idea of associating sentiment with him appeared absurd.  Had they ever been separated the affair might have had a different termination; but there has never been a break in their intercourse—­Jim has always been here, always the same.  That won’t do with a girl like Princess.  It is too commonplace, too devoid of interest and uncertainty.  Yes, my dear, I know that in your eyes this is folly, but at the same time it is nature.  You don’t understand.  Princess, I fear, sets undue value on intellect, holding less brilliant endowments cheap beside it.  And we must admit, Berkeley, dearly as we love Jim Byrd, and noble fellow as he is, he has not the intellectual power which commands admiration.  With all my respect for intellect, I can see that Princess greatly overrates it.  She has often declared that unless a man were intellectually her superior, she could never love him.”

“Intellectually—­a fiddle-stick!” scoffed Berkeley, contemptously.  “She don’t know what she wants, or what is good for her.  Women rarely do.  They make their matrimonial selections like the blindest of bats, the most egregious of fools, and then, when the mischief is done, go in for unending sackcloth, or a divorce court.  Pocahontas will get hold of a fellow some day who will wring her heart—­with her rubbishing longing after novelty and intellect, and fine scorn of homespun truth and loyalty.  Were I a woman, I should esteem the size of my husband’s heart, and the sweetness of his temper, matter of more importance than the bigness of his brain, or the freshness of the acquaintance.”