"Well, I should say that Lorraine is the maximum degree—and then some," was the reply.—"And that Stephanie knows it at last—when it is too late. Why didn't you marry her, Pendleton? Everyone thought you were willing—and she ought to have been."
Pendleton sent a smoke whirling upward, and followed it with another, and another—but said no word.
"It's a bit personal, I know—and you shouldn't answer," Devereux admitted—"but all the same, why didn't you?"
"Maybe Stephanie wouldn't have me," said Pendleton slowly.
"The more fool she!" the other exclaimed. "Yet it's like a woman—they never know what is best for them when they have a choice to make—at least, they choose wrong thirty-five times out of fifty."
"And forty-five out of fifty they think they are the winning fifteen—and fifty times out of fifty, it is no one's business but their own," Pendleton replied.
"You're right in theory," Devereux admitted, "but you're wrong in practice. We have some business with our friends' affairs—enough to regret when we see one of them, especially a woman, going on the rocks from very heedlessness of the buoys that mark the channel."
"Why not chain in the channel so they can't get out of it?" asked Pendleton.
"They would break the chains from very perversity and go on the rocks just the same," Devereux averred. "The only way is to provide a pilot who won't run amuck."
"You're mixing your metaphors, old man!"