unquestioning patriotism—of assumption that no country but the United States of America mattered in the very least—and the intense concentrated individualism. Of hard-headed American determination to "get there" at any honourable cost, of jealously hidden romanticism. [Pg 123] Broderick was almost at the Crumley gate. He halted for a moment under the dark maples and glanced up the long shadowy avenue, his own narrower and still more jealously guarded "romantic streak" appreciating the possibilities on a dusky evening with a girl whose face floated for a moment before him. But he banished her promptly, searching his memory for some salient trait in Rush that he instinctively knew would establish the current he desired. He found it after a moment of intense concentration. Rush was the sort of man that loves not woman but a woman. His very friendship for Alys Crumley was evidence that he cared nothing for girls as girls. Only the exceptional drew him, and mere youth left him unmoved. Knowing Rush as he did, he felt his way rapidly toward the facts. Alys, woman-like, had succumbed to propinquity, and betrayed herself; Rush, finding his mere masculine loneliness misinterpreted, and being honourable to boot, had promptly withdrawn. But why? Alys would have made him a delightful and useful wife. She was one of those too clever girls whom celibacy made neurotic and uncertain, but out of whom matrimony and maternity knocked all the nonsense at once and finally. She would make a splendid woman. [Pg 124] [Pg 124] He should have thought her just the girl to allure Rush, whom he also knew to be fastidious and to set a high value on the good old Brabant blood. Moreover, it was time that Rush would be wanting the permanent companionship of a woman, a bright, progressive, but feminine woman. He had observed certain signs. Alys, apparently, had not measured up to Rush's secret ideal of the wholly desirable woman, nor appealed to that throbbing vein of romanticism which he had striven to bury beneath the dusty tomes of the law. What sort of woman, then, could satisfy all he desired? And had he found her? Broderick recalled a certain knightly exaltation in Rush's blue eyes which had come and gone as they discussed Mrs. Balfame, although not a word of the adroit concept he had built remained
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