If he was let alone, and his moral
regeneration forgotten, and he himself treated just like any other man,
Mason felt that Ford would thereby have all the encouragement he needed.
Ford was once more plainly content with life, and was taking it in
twenty-four-hour doses again; healthful doses, these, and different in
every respect from those days spent in the sordid round of ill-living in
town; nor did he flay his soul with doubts lest he should disappoint
this man who trusted him so rashly and so implicitly. Ford was busy at
work which appealed to the best of him. He was thrown into companionship
with men who perforce lived cleanly and naturally, and with Ches Mason,
who was his friend. At meals he sometimes gave thought to Mrs. Kate, and
frequently to Josephine. The first he admired impersonally for her
housewifely skill, and smiled at secretly for her purely feminine
outlook upon life and her positive views upon subjects of which she knew
not half the alphabet. He had discovered that Mason did indeed refrain
from smoking in the house because she discountenanced tobacco; and since
she had a talent for making a man uncomfortably aware of her disapproval
by certain wordless manifestations of scorn for his weaknesses, Ford
also took to throwing away his cigarette before he crossed the bridge on
his way to her domain.
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