CHAPTER II

"So seems the life of man, O King, as a sparrow's flight through the hall when a man is sitting at meat in wintertide, with the warm fire lighted on the hearth, but the chill rainstorm without. The sparrow flies in at one door, and tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the hearth fire, and then flying forth from the other, vanishes into the wintry darkness whence it came. So tarries for a moment the life of a man in our sight, but what is before it, what after it, we know not."

I

WALKED round to Brook Street one after

noon to look up my sister-in-law, Mary Cassilis, whom I had not seen since her ball, and whom I had greatly missed during her absence abroad during the winter and early spring.

I think Mary genuinely liked me for I filled a want; probably there is nothing a widow feels the lack of so keenly as the masculine dust-bin, into which she has been accustomed to shoot all the conversational and other rubbish that no one else will put up

with. And my brother had been a docile creature, heaven-born to marriage, as not one man out of a million is, though you always felt that he was merely an annotation to Mary's text.

Her cool drawing-rooms rested me; the absence of many flowers, the prevalence of growing things, so that green was its prevailing atmosphere, pleased my taste, and I sank into a deep chair while Mary put me through my paces in a way astonishing in so frail and elegant a person.

Ben," she said, "you are nearly twenty years younger than I am, and ought to be my son instead of my brother-in-law; if you had been, you would be a swell G. P. now; babies are always in season-or if you object to them, have gone in for something to eat or drink, or boots or clothes, things people can't do without, you know, that's what pays. Poor men shouldn't try to run philanthropy shows-it's a rotten, false, undignified attitude for the men who must earn a living-wage, or go to the wall, to be called an "honorary" surgeon-he should be paid, and paid wellit's all wrong, I tell you. See the order, the

luxury even, the flowers, the

money lavished on the patients in the hospitals, and yet you, and the other men who cure those people, and keep the whole thing going, and without whom the whole fabric must collapse, are not paid one farthing!"

"We get valuable experience there,” I said.

Experience! And while you are sticking your silly noses in the air, and giving your best years and energies to doing gratuitous work, your landlord takes the roof from over your head, and you find yourself star-gazing in the street!"

"In excellent company," I said. "Men with the money instinct are usually detestable."

"But it brings a man peace, and a down bed at the last," said Mary. "It's mediocrity, not genius, that blends with the spirit of the age. There are no great men now," she added sadly," they are all dead, and we don't grow the breed any more. Yet how scarce

they were those glorious names that are household words to us-how rare they seem, when in this great city, we see an endless procession of millions of men, and not one

half-dozen among them all, whose names will live when this century is out!"

"Fame, like success, is mainly the product of the imagination," I said. "Failure has its joys, and promotes peace and quiet."

In

"Shame on you!" cried Mary indignantly. "If talent abounds, genius has fled from our midst, because we are not strenuous enough, because we work for gold; the ancients and Elizabethans worked for immortality. science we have made great strides, but have we added anything tangible to the store of great poetry, of great prose, in the cupboard (there is not enough to fill a temple) of Fame? Energy, power, is what is demanded in vain in this sickly, self-conscious age."

"Oh, let us be happy, and blow strenuous endeavour," I said lazily, "especially in hot weather."

"Rubbish," said Mary; "such opinions suited your brother Ernest, because he hated responsibility of any kind. That's why he married me. He thought that food dropped ready cooked into a plate before him, and clothes blew on of themselves; and he never mastered the intricacies of a cheque-book, or

the everyday business of life. So absentminded, too! When I heard of a woman who was at the Military Tournament, and in her joy at the relief of Mafeking, turned round and violently shook the biggest nose nearest to her, I thought it was just the thing Ernest might do on provocation, and forget to apologise."

I agreed that it was quite possible.

"And one night, after I and the servants had all gone to bed, he went out to post a letter with his lighted bedroom candlestick in his hand!

"He must have been thinking of Diogenes," I said, "who lit a candle in the daytime, and went through the streets saying, 'I am looking for a man.' If he had lived to be old——

She sighed. "It's so hard to bring up our second-childhood children properly! But I miss him," she went on sadly. "To be strong, really strong, you must have someone to lean on you; then your back stiffens, you stand foursquare to the winds that blow. You must not, dare not weaken. But once he is withdrawn, often you collapse, and fall yourself."

"But perhaps he is better off," I said.