"I wish I could see
this, but I can't. Frankly, since you ask me, I may say that I have been
troubled about it. 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.
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