“Do you know whom he took for Desmond, Mr. Allen?  I have an idea it was himself.”

Mr. Allen, had now recovered some of his composure.

“If so, it was done unconsciously,” he said.  “I suppose an author must put his best thoughts in the mouth of his hero.”

“But it is like him?” she insisted.

“Yes, he holds the same views.”

“Which you do not agree with.”

“I have not said I did not agree with them,” he replied, taking up his own defence; “the point is not that men are more inconstant than women, but that women have more excuse for inconstancy.  If I remember correctly, Desmond, in a letter to Rosamond, says:  ’Inconstancy in a woman, because of the present social conditions, is often pardonable.  In a man, nothing is more despicable.’  I think that is so.  I believe that a man should stick by the woman to whom he has given his word as closely as he sticks by his friends.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the aggressive second voice, “that is all very well.  But how about the woman to whom he has not given his word?  Unfortunately, the present social conditions allow a man to go pretty far without a definite statement.”

At this I could not refrain from looking at Miss Trevor.  She was bending over her knitting and had broken her thread.

“It is presumption for a man to speak without some foundation,” said the Celebrity, “and wrong unless he is sure of himself.”

“But you must admit,” the second voice continued, “that a man has no right to amuse himself with a woman, and give her every reason to believe he is going to marry her save the only manly and substantial one.  And yet that is something which happens every day.  What do you think of a man who deserts a woman under those conditions?”

“He is a detestable dog, of course,” declared the Celebrity.

And the cock in the inn yard was silent.

“I should love to be able to quote from a book at will,” said the quieting voice, for the sake of putting an end to an argument which bid fair to become disagreeable.  “How do you manage to do it?”

“It was simply a passage that stuck in my mind,” he answered modestly; “when I read a book I pick them up just as a roller picks up a sod here and there as it moves over the lawn.”

“I should think you might write, Mr. Allen, you have such an original way of putting things!”

“I have thought of it,” returned the Celebrity, “and I may, some fine day.”

Wherewith he thrust his hands into his pockets and sauntered off with equanimity undisturbed, apparently unaware of the impression he had left behind him.  And the Fifth Reader story popped into my head of good King William (or King Frederick, I forgot which), who had a royal fancy for laying aside the gayeties of the court and straying incognito among his plainer subjects, but whose princely origin was invariably detected in spite of any disguise his Majesty could invent.