"And she'll keep it, too!" triumphed Kaire. "High-strung kids always do, somehow! Whatever else they smash—china, hearts, laws—they never seem to break their words!—not before they're twenty, anyway!" he grinned with sudden diablerie. "And Daphne is only eighteen!"
"Hanged if you're not rather an amusing cuss!" admitted Bretton. Very coolly he narrowed his eyes to the insolent young face before him. "I—I recognize your charm! Two parts devil to one part imp—and all the rest of it. The mysterious fascination of your scar with every emotion you feel in the World traveling up and down its white track—in an open car! Truly, I'm sincerely sorry about your health!"
"Oh, quit twitting about my lungs!" snarled Kaire. 206
"Lungs?" questioned Bretton with faintly raised eyebrows. "Lungs? Oh, dear me—there are several other things about your looks—besides lungs—that I don't like!" Mercilessly, but not maliciously, he jumped up and crossed to a spot directly confronting Kaire. "With your waggish humor," he said, "and your inherently sportsmanlike instincts, you might have made a pretty good lad if you'd only started earlier." Piercingly his eyes probed into Kaire's. "But my little girl," he said, "isn't— going—to pay—because you didn't start earlier!"
With an oath Kaire sprang to his feet.
"I'm not the only man in the world who's been wild!" he cried. "And you know it—if anybody does!"
"You're the only man I think of at the moment," said Bretton, "who isn't pretty sorry about it when it comes to offering his stale hand to the first real woman of his life."
"Is—that—so?" sneered Kaire.
"It's—so," said Bretton very quietly. With a single glance at 207 Daphne he turned to Kaire again, struck another match, lit another cigarette. "Love isn't an overcoat, you know, Kaire," he said. "It's underclothes! The White Linen of Life! And there seems to be something—peculiarly and particularly offensive to a fastidious body—in being proffered personal linen which still retains even the scent—let alone the sweat of a previous relation . . . . The Almighty, our Mothers, and our Ministers, may forgive us our slovenly dinginess or our careless laundrying, being all of them more or less Museum Collectors and interested inherently in our historical values or the original fineness of our weave-or the ultimate endurance of our warp and woof. But the Almighty—and our Mothers—and our Ministers—don't have to wear us, Kaire! Not next to their skins! Don't have to sleep with us—wake with us—live with us—die with us!" The hand that held the cigarette trembled very slightly, the eyes that glanced back again at Daphne were dark and poignant with pain. "You are perfectly right, Kaire! No man knows better than I the mess that a chap may make of his life—nor how poor the fabric that I, personally—in the common 208 experience of men—will have to offer the woman I love . . . . very worn it will be, very frayed!—but at least it has been cleansed in the bitter tears of regret!"
"Is that—so?" sneered Kaire.