Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/275

 wife was stolen, he went on the warpath for the same reason a cow-boy lynches a horse-thief, because he can't afford to lose valuable property. Now the modern woman is no longer an asset, but a liability.…" He paused, so filled with admiration for his own metaphor struck out in the heat of discussion, that he could not go on. Great Cæsar's ghost! That wasn't so bad! He'd have to remember that in the next theme he wrote.

Gregg was disposing of him sardonically, "Oh, yes, we know Brown's soaking up the economic interpretation of history like a sponge. Have a mind of your own. Brown. You don't have to believe all your Prof. tells you. What do you think, Crit?"

Neale sailed cautiously a little nearer his real thought than he usually ventured, with the casual comment, "Well, there do seem to be some things a man can't bring himself to do, no matter how much he wants to. I wonder if maybe it isn't just inherited race-experience warning us off from what's bad for man in the long run."

Brown came back for revenge, "Oh, yes, we know the rest, what's that but the anthropology course? Have a mind of your own!"

"As a matter of fact, pleasure's the only motive," Elliott laid down the final dictum. "Every time you do something you do it because you'd rather. If you didn't, you'd do something else."

Some one brought out another profundity deep enough to match this, affirming, "Oh, of course, everything's relative!"

And this was still so new an aphorism to them, that they let it alone, the party breaking up over a last round of weak rickeys squeezed from the bottle.

Neale waited till he saw Gregg deep in "Venice Preserved"; then he opened a small volume, and shielding it from any random glances of his room-mate, began reading, "The Last Ride Together."