"Thank you; that's very encouraging," said Harry. He looked thoughtfully at her for a moment and continued: "Has it ever occurred to you, Madge, that you are quite a remarkable young woman?"
"Heavens yes, hundreds of times!"
"That's a denial, I suppose. However, it's true. Look at the way you've just been talking to me!... You have what I've come to admire very much during the past few months—perfect balance of viewpoint. You have what one might call a sense of ultimacy—is there such a word? It's like a number of children, each playing about in his own little backyard, surrounded by a high fence that he can't see over, suspecting the existence of a lot of other backyards, with children in them wondering what lay beyond in just the same way. Then occasionally there is born a happy being to whom is given the privilege of looking down on the whole lot of them from the church steeple, and being able to see each backyard in its exact relation to all the other backyards. That's you.... It's a rare gift!"
Madge was at first amused by this elaborate compliment, but she ended by being rather touched by it.
"It's very nice of you to say that," she replied after a moment, "no matter how little foundation there may be for it. It proves one thing, at any rate—I have no monopoly of the quality of ultimacy! You wouldn't be able to think I was ultimate, would you, unless you were a wee bit ultimate yourself? And that goes to prove what I said about your attitude toward your profession."
"I'm afraid you can't make me believe in my own ultimacy, no matter how hard you try," said Harry. "In fact I pursue the rival study of propinquity—the art of never seeing beyond one's own nose!"
"Well, you must at least let me believe in the ultimacy of your finding your profession," insisted Madge. But Harry only shook his head.
Commencement arrived at last, and Aunt Cecilia, attended by a representative delegation of her progeny, flopped down upon Aunt Selina, prepared to do as much by Harry as she had by his brother two years earlier. Aunt Cecilia belonged to the important class of American women who regard a graduation as a family event second in importance only to a wedding or a funeral, ranking slightly higher than a "coming out." The occasion was a particularly joyous one to her because of Harry's being able to celebrate it in a full blaze of righteousness and truth, and because of the consequent opportunities for motherly fluttering.
"Dear Harry," she said, as she kissed, him on his arrival; "I am so glad to be here to see you graduate, and so glad that—that everything has gone so splendidly. It is so much, much nicer—that is, it is so nice to think that—"
"Yes, dear; you mean, isn't it nice that I'm respectable again," said Harry, with a flippancy made gentle by the sight of her kind blue eyes. "I am respectable now, you know, so you needn't be afraid to talk about it. We can all be respectable together; you're respectable, and I'm respectable, and Ruth is respectable and Lucy is respectable, and Aunt Selina is respectable—we hope; how about that, Aunt Selina?—and altogether we're an eminently respectable family. All except Beatrice, that is, who is far, far too nobly born, being related, in fact, to a marquis. No one in the peerage, Aunt C. dear, likes to be called respectable—it's considered insulting. No one, that is, above the rank of baron; the barons are now all reformed brewers, who get their peerages by being so respectable that people forget all about the brewing, and that is English democracy, and isn't it a splendid thing, dear? When you marry Ruth to an English peer, you must be sure to have him a baron, because none of the others are respectable."