In the course of the morning Mr. Locker found an opportunity to speak in private with Mrs. Easterfield.  “I am in great trouble,” he said; “I want to marry Miss Asher.”

“You show unusual promptness,” said Mrs. Easterfield.

“Not at all,” replied Locker.  “This sort of thing is not unusual with me.  My mind is a highly sensitive plate, and receives impressions almost instantaneously.  If it were a large mind these impressions might be placed side by side, and each one would perhaps become indelible.  But it is small, and each impression claps itself down on the one before.  This last one, however, is the strongest of them all, and obliterates everything that went before.”

“It strikes me,” said Mrs. Easterfield, “that if you were to pay more attention to your poems and less to young ladies it would be better.”

“Hardly,” said Mr. Locker; “for it would be worse for the poems.”

The general appearance of Mr. Locker gave no reason to suppose that he would be warranted in assuming a favorable issue from any of the impressions to which his mind was so susceptible.  He was small, rather awkwardly set up, his head was large, and the features of his face seemed to have no relation to each other.  His nose was somewhat stubby, and had nothing to do with his mouth or eyes.  One of his eyebrows was drawn down as if in days gone by he had been in the habit of wearing a single glass.  The other brow was raised over a clear and wide-open light-blue eye.  His mouth was large, and attended strictly to its own business.  It transmitted his odd ideas to other people, but it never laughed at them.  His chin was round and prominent, suggesting that it might have been borrowed from somebody else.  His cheeks were a little heavy, and gave no assistance in the expression of his ideas.

His profession was that of a poet.  He called himself a practical poet, because he made a regular business of it, turning his poetic inspirations into salable verse with the facility and success, as he himself expressed it, of a man who makes boxes out of wood.  Moreover, he sold these poems as readily as any carpenter sold his boxes.  Like himself, Claude Locker’s poems were always short, always in request, and sometimes not easy to understand.

The poem he wrote that night was a word-picture of the rising moon entangled in a sheaf of corn upon a hilltop, with a long-eared rabbit sitting near by as if astonished at the conflagration.

“A very interesting girl, that Miss Asher,” said Mr. Fox to his wife that evening.  “I do not know when I have laughed so much.”

“I thought you were finding her interesting,” said Mrs. Fox.  “To me it was like watching a game of roulette at Monte Carlo.  It was intensely interesting, but I could not imagine it as having anything to do with me.”

“No, my dear,” said Mr. Fox, “it could have nothing to do with you.”

After Mrs. Easterfield retired she sat for a long time, thinking of Olive.  That young person and Mr. Locker had been boating that afternoon, and Olive had had the oars.  Mr. Locker had told with great effect how she had pulled to get out of the smooth water, and how she had dashed over the rapids and between the rocks in such a way as to make his heart stand still.