"Then how comes it that you are so well informed?"
"Happily for me, I ran across Aunt Love."
"Oh, that explains her prolonged absence perhaps. Usually it is hard for us to persuade her to spend a whole day down here. We must hurry a little, I think." Clover laughed. "Hurrying is the normal condition of people who try to keep appointments at the Fair."
They threaded their way amid groups and figures in plaster and marble, and emerged from the southern entrance.
"What I started to speak of when I first met you was the contrast of a man’s and woman’s way of approaching that bronze," said Page. "I went up to it and especially noticed the muscles and veins of the man’s hand and the truthful way the fingers sink into the flesh of the baby it supports. You approached it and took hold of the baby’s hand and patted his leg. Now why didn’t I want to pat that little fellow’s fat leg?"
"I give it up," laughed Clover. "I can only say you had very poor taste."
"No, there is a deep reason for the difference. Of course it is a woman’s nature to pet a baby."
"What a deep discovery! I congratulate you on the result of your explorations. Do you think you shall write a book about it?"
"Yes, you do, I won’t deny it." Clover was a trifle ashamed of having been caught in her loving ebullition toward the soft bronze, and was willing to laugh it away.
"Still it is interesting," Page went on musingly, "to observe how affection is outward with women and inward with men."
"That doesn’t sound complimentary to us, Mr. Page. I hope you mean well."
Gorham’s pensive eyes met her merry ones. "Yes. I revere the wise arrangement by which it takes a man and a woman to make one complete being; and the more I observe and understand refined human nature, the more I think I see the possibilities, and what it was intended that marriage should be. You are a good walker, Mrs. Van Tassel."
"Yes; I am thinking how impatient Mildred and Jack will be with me. I will give you a subject for your analytical mind. Make a record of the broken appointments at the World’s Fair and discover the reasons for them. You would have a psychological study of absorbing interest."
"All phases of human nature are interesting."
"Even that where vials of righteous wrath are poured out upon you for delinquency when you know you haven’t any defense to offer? You are my defense this time."