The strife between his prejudices and his sense of
justice was what made him always interesting in all the great prairie and
foothill country of which Askatoon was the centre.
He had got his shock, indeed, before Mazarine had introduced his wife to
the Mayor. Not for nothing had he studied the human mind in its relation
to the human body, and the expression of that mind speaking through the
body. The instant Joel Mazarine and his wife stepped out of the train, he
knew they were what they were to each other. That was a real achievement
in knowledge, because Mazarine was certainly sixty-five if he was a day,
and his wife was a slim, willowy slip of a girl, not more than nineteen
years of age, with the most wonderful Irish blue eyes and long dark
lashes. There was nothing of the wife or woman about her, save something
in the eyes, which seemed to belong to ages past and gone, something so
solemnly wise, yet so painfully confused, that there flashed into the
Young Doctor's mind at first glance of her the vision of a young bird
caught from its thoughtless, sunbright journeyings, its reckless freedom
of winged life, into the captivity of a cage.
She smiled, this child, as she shook hands with the Mayor, and it had the
appeal of one who had learned the value of smiling--as though it answered
many a question and took the place of words and the trials of the tongue.
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