Again he surprised the lurking smile in the velvety eyes, but this time it was half-mischievous.
"We have a college here in Wahaska, and you might get a place on the faculty," she suggested; adding: "As an instructor in philosophy, for example."
"Philosophy? that is the one thing in the world that I know least about."
"In theory, perhaps," she conceded, laughing openly at him now. "But in practice you are perfect, Mr. Griswold. Hasn't anybody ever told you that before?"
"No; and you don't mean it. You are merely taking a base advantage of a sick man and making fun of me. I don't mind: I'm in a heavenly temper this afternoon."
"Oh, but I do mean it, honestly," she averred. "You are a philosopher, really and truly, and I can prove it. Do you feel equal to another little drive down-town?"
"Being a philosopher, I ought to be equal to anything," he postulated; and he went up-stairs to get a street coat and his hat.
She had disappeared when he came down again, and he went out to sit on the sun-warmed veranda while he waited. He had already forgotten what she had said about the object of the drive--the proving of the philosophic charge against him--and was looking forward with keenly pleasurable anticipations to another outing with her, the second for that day. It had come to this, now; to admitting frankly the charm which he was still calling sensuous, and which, in the moments of insight recurring, as often as they can be borne, to the imaginative, and vouchsafed now and then even to the wayfaring, he was still disposed to characterize as an appeal to that which was least worthy in him.
Latterly, however, he had begun to question himself more acutely as to the exact justice of this attitude; and while he was sunning himself on the veranda and listening for the hoof-beats of the big trap horse on the stable approach, he was doing it again. In those graver analytical moments he had called Margery a preternaturally clever little barbarian, setting his own immense obligation to her aside in deference to what he assumed to be the immutable realities. In the sun-warming excursion came another of those precious moments of insight; a moment in which he was given a sobering glimpse of the deathless Philistine within. Who was he to be setting his machine-made ideals above the living, breathing, human fact whose very limitations and shortcomings might figure as angelic virtues when weighed in any balance save that of the Philistinic ego?