Alfred Morgan is entirely different. I do not believe that he ever had a morbid regret in his life. In his work he is fanatically conscientious, doing the best he can and knowing that his best is as good as any other man's, for he does not attempt anything unless he is sure of his qualifications. This does not imply any lack of grief and worry when a patient "goes to the bad." He does grieve, sitting with his head between his hands, while his black hair is ruffled up like a shoe-brush straight across his forehead. Sometimes he softly repeats, "Well, I'll swear! Well, I'll swear!"—in a baffled, helpless sort of way, but you know that he has not been helpless where any other man would have been potent. And he never has the soul-eating remorse which follows the knowledge that one might have done better.
As to Alfred's life, I imagine that it is kept in the same condition of fitness that his body is—clean and wholesome, yet full-blooded and entirely normal. If he should meet red-robed Folly on a pleasant highway he would undoubtedly linger a while, taking off his hat politely and addressing her as Human Nature. He would shake hands good-temperedly as he left her and promise to come again some time when his business engagements would permit. But he would never give the matter another thought probably.
Richard Chalmers' cold face proclaims an asceticism that would call the prettily dressed little Folly "Sin," yet I fancy that he would linger—much longer than Alfred, no doubt—and leave the gay fairy with a frown on his face, which would remain until the next morning, when he would throw his bootjack at his valet.
Where was I? Oh, yes, I had just turned the water off! It's a good thing I did, too, before this digression, or the house would have been flooded.
Again, what I have said of Richard Chalmers is also true of myself. I had lingered on the pleasant highways with a delightful Folly all day yesterday, which seemed to me in the cold light of day this morning a sort of Sin. A sin against good sense, I concluded, or against good taste, especially if he noticed.
"A horrid young idiot! Of course that's what he considered you were." I kept torturing myself with these thoughts until others more agonizing still came to torment me. Suppose he had not thought of me at all!
The dash of the cold water restored me to something much more nearly like my normal self, and by the time I had combed the tangles out of my hair and spoken to a pair of redbirds which live in a tree right by my window I was feeling poetry again. A shower of scattered cigar ashes, which Dilsey had not yet swept off the front porch, with two or three red-and-gold bands which I had noticed on his cigars, set me singing.
"You're not an idiot at all, Ann," I commented, as I looked about to make sure that no one was near, then grabbed up one of these red-and-gold bands. "No wonder you have lost your head over him, for he is perfectly beautiful, and you always did get intoxicated on beautiful things.—And if he wasn't impressed too, his eyes were lying! No, they could not lie, because they are too lovely!"
I knew that the family would all be talking about him at the breakfast-table, which I found to be true, and they were so absorbed in their talk that they all, except mother, gave me a perfunctory greeting as I came in. Strange to say, they were not talking about his good looks.
"Well, he's had occasion to study the question in all its phases," Rufe kept on with the subject at hand as I slid into my chair and gave myself up to the charms of a breakfast food. "He's studied it in nearly every land. He spent a part of last year in—"