Diane of the Green Van

"Tell me," he said gently another night; "this inordinate sensitiveness of which you speak. To what do you attribute it?"

Carl colored.

"My mother," he said, "was courageous and unconventional. She recognized the fact that marriage and monogamy are not the ethical answers of the future--that though ideal unions sometimes result, it is not because of marriage, but in spite of it--that motherhood is the inalienable right of every woman with the divine spark in her heart, no matter what the disappointing lack of desirable marriage chances in her life may be. Therefore, when the years failed to produce her perfect and desirable human complement, she sought a eugenic mate and bore me, refusing to saddle herself to a meaningless, man-made partnership with infinite possibilities of domestic hell in it, merely as a sop to the world-Cerberus of convention. Marriage could have added nothing to her lofty conceptions of motherhood--but I--I have been keenly resentful and sensitive--for her. I think it has been the feeling that no one understood. Then, after she died, there was no one--only Philip. I saw him rarely."

"And your cousin?"

"She had been taught--to misunderstand. There was always that barrier. And she is very high spirited. Though we were much together as youngsters she could not forget."

A singular maternal history, a beautiful, high-spirited, intolerant cousin who had been taught to despise his mother's morality! What warring forces indeed had gone to the making of this man before him.

"You have been lonely?"

"Yes," said Carl. "My mother died when I needed her most. Later when I was very lonely--or hurt--I drank."

"And brooded!" finished Mic-co quietly.

"Yes," said Carl. "Always." He spoke a little bitterly of the wild inheritance of passions and arrogant intolerance with which Nature had saddled him.

"All of which," reminded Mic-co soberly, "you inflamed by intemperate drinking. Is it an inherited appetite?"

"It is not an appetite at all," said Carl.

"You like it?"

"If you mean that to abandon it is to suffer--no. I enjoyed it---yes."

The wind that blew through the open windows and doors of the lodge stirred the moonlit water lilies in the pool. To Carl they were pale and unreal like the wraith of the days behind him. Like a reflected censer in the heart of the bloom shone the evening star. The peace of it all lay in Mic-co's fine, dark, tranquil face as he talked, subtly moulding another's mind in the pattern of his own. He did not preach. Mic-co smoked and talked philosophy.

Carl had known but little respect for the opinions of others. He was to learn it now. He was to find his headstrong will matched by one stronger for all it was gentler; his impudent philosophy punctured by a wisdom as great as it was compassionate; his own magnetic power to influence as he willed, a negligible factor in the presence of a man whose magnetism was greater.