"Somehow you're nothing but a romantic, sentimental boy. I've heard you quote Keats and Shelley when an arithmetic or a geography would have been much more to the purpose. I was born that way myself, and so you see I understand your malady and sympathize with you, but as for myself I've worked a complete cure."
"How did you manage it, Jack?" asked Westover in amused anticipation.
"Oh, easily enough. I have cultivated catholicity of taste in the matter of girls. You know all sentimentality in men has its ultimate origin in their attitude toward women. Now in sentiment, as in everything else, moderation is desirable and excess is destructive. Realizing that fact I have cultivated moderation, by falling madly in love with every pretty young woman I have met, and with some pretty old ones also. But as one encounters a rapid succession of pretty young women, the habit of falling in love with each of them is a securely protective agency. You see I never have time to become idiotically in love with one young woman before meeting another who knocks all that out of my head. To-day's girl rescues me from yesterday's. It's a case of one nail driving out another."
"You are the worst cynic I ever knew, Jack."
"Perhaps I am. But I see the boys are here with the horses. Let's be off and away, forgetting philosophy and girls and pessimism and moonlight and molasses candy for a time at least. Is that a quarter of shoat Cilla is toting from the ice-house? In verity it is, and a decent respect for its succulent attractiveness should prompt us to arm ourselves and meet it with an appetite. So here goes for a good hard gallop, with stiff fences by the way."
XXVIII
THE EVENTS OF A DAY
Only once had Westover been interrupted during his hours of laborious and futile effort to write his letter to Colonel Conway. Jack Towns, being an ideal guest, had occupied himself with books, strolls, and other silent means of passing the time, so that his host had been in no way reminded of his existence. But the weather had not been so unobtrusive a guest. Considerably before noon there came a squall which for ten or fifteen minutes threatened destruction to everything movable about the place. It unroofed a cellar door at the back of the house. It carried away the shed of a tobacco barn, and curiously enough one of the cook's pigs, which she was bringing up luxuriously on "pot liquor and kitchen stuff," disappeared during the brief hurricane. Whether the obese porker was really blown away, as most of the house servants stoutly contended, or whether it was that some colored person with an appetite had simultaneously seized the opportunity and the pig and got away with both, was a point never accurately determined.
Boyd Westover cared nothing for damages that might be repaired, but he was sorely distressed by the wreckage of a favorite mimosa tree that flourished near one corner of the porch. He even quitted his writing, when the little squall had passed away, and with Jack Towns's very inexpert assistance, attempted some repairs. But when there arose the question of sawing off a broken limb, he abandoned the undertaking, saying:
"We'll leave that till Carley Farnsworth comes. He's due here to-day to see some of my people who are ill. He's a much better horticulturist than either of us, Jack, and besides he's a surgeon and will know better how to give the poor tree a chance to grow into symmetry again."
Then, as he sorrowfully contemplated the torn and broken mimosa, he muttered: