Time is naught, existence a span.  One evening when she was old Mrs. Conyers, and he old Judge Morris, she sixty and he sixty-five, they met at an evening party.  In all those years he had never spoken to her, nurturing his original dislike and rather suspecting that it was she who had so ruined him.  But on this night there had been a great supper and with him a great supper was a great weakness:  there had been wine, and wine was not a weakness at all, but a glass merely made him more than happy, more than kind.  Soon after supper therefore he was strolling through the emptied rooms in a rather lonesome way, his face like a red moon in a fog, beseeching only that it might shed its rays impartially on any approachable darkness.

Men with wives and children can well afford to turn hard cold faces to the outside world:  the warmth and tenderness of which they are capable they can exercise within their own restricted enclosures.  No doubt some of them consciously enjoy the contrast in their two selves—­the one as seen abroad and the other as understood at home.  But a wifeless, childless man—­wandering at large on the heart’s bleak common—­has much the same reason to smile on all that he has to smile on any:  there is no domestic enclosure for him:  his affections must embrace humanity.

As he strolled through the rooms, then, in his appealing way, seeking whom he could attach himself to, he came upon her seated in a doorway connecting two rooms.  She sat alone on a short sofa, possibly by design, her train so arranged that he must step over it if he advanced—­the only being in the world that he hated.  In the embarrassment of turning his back upon her or of trampling her train, he hesitated; smiling with lowered eyelids she motioned him to a seat by her side.

“What a vivacious, agreeable old woman,” he soliloquized with enthusiasm as he was driven home that night, sitting in the middle of the carriage cushions with one arm swung impartially through the strap on each side.  “And she has invited me to Sunday evening supper.  Me!—­after all these years—­in that house!  I’ll not go.”

But he went.

“I’ll not go again,” he declared as he reached home that night and thought it over.  “She is a bad woman.”

But the following Sunday evening he reached for his hat and cane:  “I must go somewhere,” he complained resentfully.  “The saints of my generation are enjoying the saint’s rest.  Nobody is left but a few long-lived sinners, of whom I am a great part.  They are the best I can find, and I suppose they are the best I deserve.”

Those who live long miss many.  Without exception his former associates at the bar had been summoned to appear before the Judge who accepts no bribe.