The Desert and the Sown | Page 2

away, and I'm exceedingly comfortable."
"You are exceedingly charming to say so--on top of that last stick, too!" The colonel had Irish as well as Virginian progenitors. "Well," he sighed, proceeding to make himself conditionally happy, "Moya will never forgive me! We spoil each other shamefully when we're alone, but of course we try to jack each other up when company comes. It's a great comfort to have some one to spoil, isn't it, now? I needn't ask which it is in your family!"
"The spoiled one?" Mrs. Bogardus smiled rather coldly. "A woman we had for governess, when Christine was a little thing, used to say: 'That child is the stuff that tyrants are made of!' Tyrants are made by the will of their subjects, don't you think, generally speaking?"
"Well, you couldn't have made a tyrant of your son, Mrs. Bogardus. He's the Universal Spoiler! He'll ruin my striker, Jephson. I shall have to send the fellow back to the ranks. I don't know how you keep a servant good for anything with Paul around."
"Paul thinks he doesn't like to be waited on," Paul's mother observed shrewdly. "He says that only invalids, old people, and children have any claim on the personal service of others."
"By George! I found him blacking his own boots!"
Mrs. Bogardus laughed.
"But I'm paying a man to do it for him. It upsets my contract with that other fellow for Paul to do his work. We have a claim on what we pay for in this world."
"I suppose we have. But Paul thinks that nothing can pay the price of those artificial relations between man and man. I think that's the way he puts it."
"Good Heavens! Has the boy read history? It's a relation that began when the world was made, and will last while men are in it."
"I am not defending Paul's ideas, Colonel. I have a great sympathy with tyrants myself. You must talk to him. He will amuse you."
"My word! It's a ticklish kind of amusement when we get talking. Why, the boy wants to turn the poor old world upside down--make us all stand on our heads to give our feet a rest. Now, I respect my feet,"--the colonel drew them in a little as the lady's eyes involuntarily took the direction of his allusion,--"I take the best care I can of them; but I propose to keep my head, such as it is, on top, till I go under altogether. These young philanthropists! They assume that the Hands and the Feet of the world, the class that serves in that capacity, have got the same nerves as the Brain."
"There's a sort of connection," said Mrs. Bogardus carelessly. "Some of our Heads have come from the class that you call the Hands and Feet, haven't they?"
The colonel admitted the fact, but the fact was the exception. "Why, that's just the matter with us now! We've got no class of legislators. I don't wish to plume myself, but, upon my word, the two services are about all we have left to show what selection and training can do. And we're only just getting the army into shape, after the raw material that was dumped into it by the civil war."
"Weren't you in the civil war yourself?"
"I was--a West Pointer, madam; and I was true to my salt and false to my blood. But, the flag over all!--at the cost of everything I held dear on earth." After this speech the colonel looked hotter than ever and a trifle ashamed of himself.
Mrs. Bogardus's face wore its most unobservant expression. "I don't agree with Paul," she said. "I wish in some ways he were more like other young men--exercise, for instance. It's a pity for young men not to love activity and leadership. Besides, it's the fashion. A young man might as well be out of the world as out of the fashion. Blood is a strange thing," she mused.
The colonel looked at her curiously. In a woman so unfrank, her occasional bursts of frankness were surprising and, as he thought, not altogether complimentary. It was as if she felt herself so far removed from his conception of her that she might say anything she pleased, sure of his miscomprehension.
"He is not lazy intellectually," said the colonel, aiming to comfort her.
"I did not say he was lazy--only he won't do things except to what he calls some 'purpose.' At his age amusement ought to be purpose enough. He ought to take his pleasures seriously--this hunting-trip, for instance. I believe, on the very least encouragement, he would give it all up!"
"You mustn't let him do that," said the colonel, warming. "All that country above Yankee Fork, for a hundred miles, after you've gone fifty north from Bonanza, is practically virgin forest. Wonderful flora and fauna! It's late for