Watts' house, planted high on the spur of the mountain a few miles above Willow Roads, the little Dutch village where Sard lived, had been owned by an organ builder about whom the Willow Roaders liked to say "nobody knew anything." The Willow Roaders, complacent in the usual village life where everyone thinks he knows "everything about everyone" disdained knowing anything about a mere organ builder. The house, surrounded as it was by hanging boulders and pine trees, looked gravely down on the big field of river and on all the little steeples and turrets and gingerbread conservativeness of Willow Roads. Watts liked to commune with the spirit of the man who had once lived here.
"I'll bet he stole some notes out of the Dawn," the man thought, "and think of nights here—like last evening, with the hermit thrush and the sky gold through the trees. 'The Organ Builder'—I can just see him, a seedy chap, possibly with too many children, probably half starving, working up here with the village below curious and gossiping, thinking maybe an organ builder was immoral."
It was a soft yet cool spring night. The little frogs in mountain rain pools kept up a croaking like rusty wheels; the pungent smells of earth and leaf mould came through the window. Fire burned quietly and soft lamplight fell on books and rugs and flickered over the cast of the Winged Victory, over the dingy chimneypiece. Watts' eyes, through the smoke of his pipe, went to this. "Nice girl," he grunted in approval, "nice girl—afraid of nothing—ready for anything, yet somehow all woman, true to type but not crystallized by type." The man, rising, walked up and down the rather bare room where one or two fine rugs caught the warm fire colors. "I can say this for the Greeks, they, themselves, fastened nothing upon civilization but healthy ideals for men and women; harvest making, home keeping, child bearing, strong bodies, imaginative minds, it wasn't until their æsthetics and the Roman plutocrats got hold of all they gave the world that their philosophies were debased." The lawyer's eyes, sombre in strength and depth, looked fixedly at the gracious woman figure; he compared it with the figures on Fifth Avenue, tripping in affected coquettishness or striding in callous mannishness. "Not clever of you, ladies, to find no middle path," he considered. "Who made you as you are to-day, Paris—the war? That's what you and the newspapers and magazines say, but come now, didn't you make yourselves? You wanted to be 'popular,' you want to be 'in' things, behold the result." Watts' mouth curled with slow mockery on his pipe.
"The Winged Victory didn't want to be popular," he decided. "She didn't want to be in things.
"She wanted to live. Who fastened the modern woman on us, anyway?" Watts demanded sternly of his dog. "Why have we got to stand for her?" The silken-haired, electric-muscled beast came over to him softly. Friar Tuck, with tail tossing, laid a devoted head on the brown golf-trousered knee. Watts tousled the long ears. "Always the henchman, aren't you, you old brute—why do you play that game?" The lawyer looked long and questioningly into his dog's eyes. "Why don't you get up and give me an order; how do you know I'm superior to you? You are probably equal to me."
He considered the bowl of his pipe then rubbed it on Friar Tuck's head.
"Just as I suppose, if men only knew it, they could be equal to Christ and the angels. Say, look here." Watts lifted the dog by his forefeet. He put the two forepaws against his breast. "How do you know I'm superior to you? Why do you play this game—do you just want to be 'popular' with me?"
Not to accept dogma—to be ready for the new light, to trim one's mental sails for the breeze from a fresh quarter, it had given the great criminal lawyer a profound insight into the human heart, an almost awful power over the souls of men. Wastrel after wastrel had tried to look Watts Shipman in the eye, and had known that some strange God of Equity sat watchful in this man—that only in proportion to their actual guilt would they be dealt with. Men and women had broken down and told him all, only because of the unendurable patience and remorseless gravity of his uncondemning gaze. He had fathered many a boy and stood many a woman on her own feet, and yet Life, the Great Mother, had held back from him what he, as human, knew must be the ultimate and only gift. Women had angled for Watts Shipman because of his fame; they had tried to use him politically; they had trusted him, feared him and been penitent before him. No woman had ever loved him.
Staring at the Victory, the man smoked silently. Half ruefully he passed his hand over the russet head on his knee, he threw back his own great black-haired head with its dapple of white spots; he stretched his long limbs and his deep-lined humorous face saddened. "Women want to play," he said softly, "uncertain, funny little things, they want to play"—tenderly, "and, not necessarily, to play fair—and I'm no plaything, although," he waved his pipe toward the bas-relief over the fire piece, "I could play with you, Miss Victory."