“Well, wait and see.  Nothing in this world means so much to me as the good old orderly home stuff.  One ought to live and die in a family.  It’s the right way.  I’m cutting up now, sowing my wild oats, but that’s nothing.  I’m just getting ready to eventually settle down and live, just as I tell you, and be an ideal orderly citizen.  It’s the only way.  It’s the way nature intends us to do.  All this early kid stuff is passing, a sorting-out process.  We get over it.  Every fellow does, or ought to be able to, if he’s worth anything, find some one woman that he can live with and stick by her.  That makes the world that you and I like to live in, and you know it.  There’s a psychic call in all of us to it, I think.  It’s the genius of our civilization, to marry one woman and settle down.  And when I do, no more of this all-night stuff with this, that and the other lady.  I’ll be a model husband and father, sure as you’re standing there.  Don’t you think I won’t.  Smile if you want to—­it’s so.  I’ll have my garden.  I’ll be friendly with my neighbors.  You can come over then and help us put the kids to bed.”

“Oh, Lord!  This is a new bug now!  We’ll have the vine-covered cot idea for a while, anyhow.”

“Oh, all right.  Scoff if you want to.  You’ll see.”

Time went by.  He was doing all the things I have indicated, living in a kind of whirl of life.  At the same time, from time to time, he would come back to this thought.  Once, it is true, I thought it was all over with the little yellow-haired girl in Philadelphia.  He talked of her occasionally, but less and less.  Out on the golf links near Passaic he met another girl, one of a group that flourished there.  I met her.  She was not unpleasing, a bit sensuous, rather attractive in dress and manners, not very well informed, but gay, clever, up-to-date; such a girl as would pass among other women as fairly satisfactory.

For a time Peter seemed greatly attracted to her.  She danced, played a little, was fair at golf and tennis, and she was, or pretended to be, intensely interested in him.  He confessed at last that he believed he was in love with her.

“So it’s all day with Philadelphia, is it?” I asked.

“It’s a shame,” he replied, “but I’m afraid so.  I’m having a hell of a time with myself, my alleged conscience, I tell you.”

I heard little more about it.  He had a fad for collecting rings at this time, a whole casket full, like a Hindu prince, and he told me once he was giving her her choice of them.

Suddenly he announced that it was “all off” and that he was going to marry the maid of Philadelphia.  He had thrown the solitaire engagement ring he had given her down a sewer!  At first he would confess nothing as to the reason or the details, but being so close to me it eventually came out.  Apparently, to the others as to myself, he had talked much of his simple home plans, his future children—­the good citizen idea.  He had talked it to his new