“Only—­there are many who haven’t the satisfaction of a flash,” I was moved to reply.

He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder as he bade me good night.

“Hugh, you ought to get married.  I’ll have to find a nice girl for you,” he said.  With an elation not unmingled with awe I made my way homeward.

Theodore Watling had given me a creed.

A week or so after the election I received a letter from George Hutchins asking me to come to Elkington.  I shall not enter into the details of the legal matter involved.  Many times that winter I was a guest at the yellow-brick house, and I have to confess, as spring came on, that I made several trips to Elkington which business necessity did not absolutely demand.

I considered Maude Hutchins, and found the consideration rather a delightful process.  As became an eligible and successful young man, I was careful not to betray too much interest; and I occupied myself at first with a review of what I deemed her shortcomings.  Not that I was thinking of marriage—­but I had imagined the future Mrs. Paret as tall; Maude was up to my chin:  again, the hair of the fortunate lady was to be dark, and Maude’s was golden red:  my ideal had esprit, lightness of touch, the faculty of seizing just the aspect of a subject that delighted me, and a knowledge of the world; Maude was simple, direct, and in a word provincial.  Her provinciality, however, was negative rather than positive, she had no disagreeable mannerisms, her voice was not nasal; her plasticity appealed to me.  I suppose I was lost without knowing it when I began to think of moulding her.

All of this went on at frequent intervals during the winter, and while I was organizing the Elkington Power and Traction Company for George I found time to dine and sup at Maude’s house, and to take walks with her.  I thought I detected an incense deliciously sweet; by no means overpowering, like the lily’s, but more like the shy fragrance of the wood flower.  I recall her kind welcomes, the faint deepening of colour in her cheeks when she greeted me, and while I suspected that she looked up to me she had a surprising and tantalizing self-command.

There came moments when I grew slightly alarmed, as, for instance, one Sunday in the early spring when I was dining at the Ezra Hutchins’s house and surprised Mrs. Hutchins’s glance on me, suspecting her of seeking to divine what manner of man I was.  I became self-conscious; I dared not look at Maude, who sat across the table; thereafter I began to feel that the Hutchins connection regarded me as a suitor.  I had grown intimate with George and his wife, who did not refrain from sly allusions; and George himself once remarked, with characteristic tact, that I was most conscientious in my attention to the traction affair; I have reason to believe they were even less delicate with Maude.  This was the logical time to withdraw—­but I dallied.  The experience