"Oh, tut, tut!" said light-hearted William Clark. "What shall you do? Why, in the first place, pull the frown from your face, Merne. Now, this young lady forsakes her husband, travels--with her father, to be sure, but none the less she travels--along the same trail taken by a certain young man down the Ohio, up the Mississippi, here to St. Louis. Should you call that a torment? Not I! I should flatter myself over it. A torment? Should you call the flowers that change in sweetness as we ride along through the wood a torment? Let them beware of me! I am no respecter of fortune when it comes to a pretty face, my friend. It is mine if it is here, and if I may kiss it--don't rebuke me, Merne! I am full of the joy of life. Woman--the nearest woman--to call her a torment! And you a soldier! I don't blame them. Torment you? Yes, they will, so long as you allow it. Then don't allow it!"
"You preach very well, Will. Of course, I know you don't practise what you preach--who does?"
"Well, perhaps! But, seriously, why take life so hard, Merne? Why don't you relax--why don't you swim with the current for a time? We live but once. Tell me, do you think there was but one woman made for each of us men in all the world? My faith, if that be true, I have had more than my share, I fear, as I have passed along! But even when it comes to marrying and settling down to hoeing an acre of corn-land and raising a shoat or two for the family--tell me, Merne, what woman does a man marry? Doesn't he marry the one at hand--the one that is ready and waiting? Do you think fortune would always place the one woman in the world ready for the one man at the one time, just when the hoeing and the shoat-raising was to the fore? It is absurd, man! Nature dares not take such chances--and does not."
Lewis did not answer his friend's jesting argument.
"Listen, Merne," Clark went on. "The memory of a kiss is better than the memory of a tear. No, listen, Merne! The print of a kiss is sweet as water of a spring when you are athirst. And the spring shows none the worse for the taste of heaven it gave you. Lips and water alike--they tell no tales. They are goods the gods gave us as part of life. But the great thirst--the great thirst of a man for power, for deeds, for danger, for adventure, for accomplishment--ah, that is ours, and that is harder to slake, I am thinking! A man's deeds are his life. They tell the tale."