question didn’t come up. Although, of course, the little lawyer had said ... “Oh, hang the little lawyer!” he muttered.

“Who are you hanging?” asked Heloise, who was near and who had heard the most lethal part of his muttering.

“I was hanging this top-heavy sea,” said Clement genially. “I wanted to show you the captain’s bridge—I’ve got permission—but with this lop....”

“Show me the captain’s bridge—now,” she laughed back. “The lop doesn’t matter—not a hang.”

That was part of her attraction. She really didn’t care a hang about things that made other people uncomfortable. She enjoyed risks. She was daring enough to go anywhere, see everything. They adventured into all the strange and usually unseen parts of that splendid ship, even as far as the boiler room. She was eager, she was[Pg 55] interested in everything, she had a zest for life. She was an ideal chum. More and more he began to perceive that she was the ideal chum—anyhow for one particular man. And presently he was saying not “Hang the little lawyer,” but “Hang Henry Gunning.”

[Pg 55]

Because both had a healthy disregard for exposure, and a healthy regard for fresh air, they became almost the sole occupants of the breezy boat deck. There they sat daily and talked; there in the evenings they sat, and sometimes did not talk.

In their talks they found splendid affinities. They found that they liked so many similar things: not merely sports, books, theaters, the open country and the other solaces of life, but other more significant things. They found that both cared most in life for character: for honesty, straightness, generosity, high-mindedness. They liked intelligent people rather than merely jolly ones. They liked people who did things rather than people who played at doing things. They found that they had a mutual austerity of ideal in their way of looking at problems ... would rather be the losers in anything than win underhand; they would take the difficult path if it was the right one, rather than the easy if it were wrong.

This brought them dangerously near to the core of the matter they were both engaged on, [Pg 56]dangerously near Henry Gunning ... yet both instinctively veered away from that.

[Pg 56]

But he had come in when she spoke of her journey to Canada—though even in this he came in only as “a friend, an 

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