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"You understand the point I a," Paula took up "Here are the pair of you Neither will see forty again You're a pair of hard- bitten sinners You've gone through hardship and exposure that dropped others all along the way You've had your fun and folly You've roughed and rowdied over the world--"

"Played the wild ass," Grahahed in

"And drunk deep," Paula added "Why, even alcohol hasn't burned you You were too tough You put the other fellows under the table, or into the hospital or the grave, and went your gorgeous way, a song on your lips, with tissues uncorroded, and without even the -after headache And the point is that you are successes Your ans are blond-beast organs And from all this emanates your blond-beast philosophy That's why you are brass tacks, and preach realis over lesser and unluckier creatures, who don't dare talk back, who, like Dick's prizefighting boys, would blow up in the first round if they resorted to the arbitra note of ospel of the strong," Paula went on "If you had been weaklings, you'd have preached the gospel of the weak and turned the other cheek But you--you pair of big- what you are, you don't turn the other cheek--"

"No," Dick interrupted quietly "We immediately roar, 'Knock his block off!' and then do it--She's got us, Evan, hip and thigh Philosophy, like religion, is what the e"

And while the talk led over the world, Paula sewed on, her eyes filled with the picture of the two big , without the surety of self that was theirs, aware of a slipping and giving of convictions so long accepted that they had seeave voice to her trouble

"The strangest part of it," she said, taking up a re about life gets one worse than nowhere A philosophic at--at least to a woainst everything, that nothing is sure For instance, Mendenhall's wife is a Lutheran She hasn't a doubt about anything All is fixed, ordained, i about, and if she did they would not alter in the least her rules of conduct for men and women in this world and in relation to the next