There are things that Patty hides, even from me, and I think I have her confidence." "I dare say you wonder why I have come to you to-day," he said.

"I can handle most situations; but I have never had to handle the love affairs of a girl, and I'm perfectly capable of making a mess of them.

Things like that are outside of my job." He seemed to her a pathetic figure as he stood there, in his boyish embarrassment and his redundant vitality, confessing an inability to surmount the obstacle in his way.

She had never known any one, man or woman, who was so obviously lacking in subtlety of perception, in all those delicate intuitions on which she relied more completely than on judgment for an accurate impression of life.

Was he, with his bigness, his earnestness, his luminous candour, only an overgrown child?
Even his physical magnetism, and she felt this in the very moment when she was trying to analyse it, even his physical magnetism might be nothing more than the spell exercised by primitive impulse over the too complex problems of civilization.