“I tell you, it’s a mistake,” he said, knife and hand balanced.  “You can’t reopen things like this.  You don’t really want to reopen them; you only want to reopen certain of them; you want to pick and choose among things, to approve and disapprove.  There must have been somewhere or other something in me you didn’t altogether dislike—­I can’t for the life of me think what it was, by the way; and you want to lay stress on that and to sink the rest.  Well, you can’t.  I won’t let you.  I’ll not submit my life to you like that.  If you want to go into things, all right; but it must be all or none.  And I’d like another drink.”

He put the knife down with a little clap as Romarin beckoned to the waiter.

There was distress on Romarin’s face.  He was not conscious of having adopted a superior attitude.  But again he told himself that he must make allowances.  Men who don’t come off in Life’s struggle are apt to be touchy, and he was; after all, the same old Marsden, the man with whom he desired to be at peace.

“Are you quite fair to me?” he asked presently, in a low voice.

Again the knife was taken up and its point advanced.

“Yes, I am,” said Marsden in a slightly raised voice; and he indicated with the knife the mirror at the end of the table.  “You know you’ve done well, and I, to all appearances, haven’t; you can’t look at that glass and not know it.  But I’ve followed the line of my development too, no less logically than you.  My life’s been mine, and I’m not going to apologise for it to a single breathing creature.  More, I’m proud of it.  At least, there’s been singleness of intention about it.  So I think I’m strictly fair in pointing that out when you talk about helping me.”

“Perhaps so, perhaps so,” Romarin agreed a little sadly.  “It’s your tone more than anything else that makes things a little difficult.  Believe me, I’ve no end in my mind except pure friendliness.”

“No-o-o,” said Marsden—­a long “no” that seemed to deliberate, to examine, and finally to admit.  “No.  I believe that.  And you usually get what you set out for.  Oh yes.  I’ve watched your rise—­I’ve made a point of watching it.  It’s been a bit at a time, but you’ve got there.  You’re that sort.  It’s on your forehead—­your destiny.”

Romarin smiled.

“Hallo, that’s new, isn’t it?” he said.  “It wasn’t your habit to talk much about destiny, if I remember rightly.  Let me see; wasn’t this more your style—­’will, passion, laughs-at-impossibilities and says,’ et cetera—­and so forth?  Wasn’t that it?  With always the suspicion not far away that you did things more from theoretical conviction than real impulse after all?”

A dispassionate observer would have judged that the words went somewhere near home.  Marsden was scraping together with the edge of his knife the crumbs of his broken roll.  He scraped them into a little square, and then trimmed the corners.  Not until the little pile was shaped to his liking did he look surlily up.