"Assuredly," laughed Henrietta. "The stout one fairly radiated truth and nobility, a manly, upright youth."
"I don't care," declared Billy warmly. "You can't always tell from appearances. You ought to know that, Henrietta. Clothes don't make the man."
"Nor his manners," laughingly retorted Henrietta.
"Sure," said the Watermelon. "Father used to say that manners didn't count any more than the good apples on the top of the box to hide the rotten ones beneath."
"I think your father was a cynic," said Henrietta sharply, into whose ears Billy had been recounting the sayings of the absent divine.
"Yes," admitted the Watermelon, "he was."
"Cynicism is a sign of failure," quoted Henrietta. "Surely your father wasn't a cynic."
"Yes, he was," declared the Watermelon, "and you didn't make that up yourself. You heard some failure say it. Father used to say, and he's right, that if a man reached forty without becoming a cynic, he was a fool and might better never have reached forty. A success can be a cynic, for cynicism is simply a pretty good idea of the meanness of human nature and no unfounded expectation of anything especially decent coming from it, isn't that so? Father used to say that love was divine, hate devilish and meanness just cussed human nature, and a mixture of the three in more or less degree made man."
"Your father was a philosopher," laughed Henrietta. "I would like to have met him."
"I thought the papers said—" began Billy, in her slow, anxious way to get things right.