as the biologist regards his rabbit, which appears to be the gist of your criticism, I can at least cheerfully take my own turn on the operating table as occasion requires.  There is, of course, a great deal that I might say in reply, but I do not understand that either of us desires a debate.  I will simply assert that your fundamental conception of life, while novel and piquant, will not hold water for a moment.  Your conception is, if I state it fairly, that a man’s life, to be useful, to be a life of service, must be given immediately to his fellows.  He must do visible and tangible things with other men.  I think a little reflection will convince you that, on the contrary, much or most of the best work of the world has been done by men whose personal lives were not unlike my own.  There was Palissy, to take a familiar minor instance.  Of course his neighbors saw in him only a madman whose cosmos was all Ego.  Yet people are grateful to Palissy to-day, and think little of the suffering of his wife and children.  Newton was no genial leader of the people.  Bacon could not even be loyal to his friends.  The living world around Socrates put him to death.  The world’s great wise men, inventors, scientists, philosophers, prophets, have not usually spent their days rubbing elbows with the bricklayer.  Yet these men have served their race better than all the good-fellows that ever lived.  To each his gifts.  If I succeed in reducing the principle of human evolution to its eternal law, I need not fear the judgment of posterity upon my life.  I shall, in fact, have performed the highest service to humankind that a finite mind can hope to compass.  Nevertheless, I am impressed by much that you say.  I daresay a good deal of it is valuable.  All of it I engage to analyze and consider dispassionately at my leisure.  Meantime, I thank you for your interest in the matter.  Good-evening.”

“Mr. Queed.”

Sharlee rose hurriedly, since hurry was so evidently necessary.  She felt profoundly stirred, she hardly knew why; all her airs of a haughty princess were fled; and she intercepted him with no remnant of her pretense that she was putting a shabby inferior in his place.

“I want to tell you,” she said, somewhat nervously, “that I—­I—­admire very much the way you’ve taken this.  No ordinary man would have listened with such—­”

“I never pretended to be an ordinary man.”

He moved, but she stood unmoving in front of him, the pretty portrait of a lady in blue, and the eyes that she fastened upon him reminded him vaguely of Fifi’s.

“Perhaps I—­should tell you,” said Sharlee, “just why I—­”

“Now don’t,” he said, smiling faintly at her with his old air of a grandfather—­“don’t spoil it all by saying that you didn’t mean it.”

Under his smile she colored a little, and, despite herself, looked confused.  He took advantage of her embarrassment to pass her with another bow and go out, leaving her struggling desperately with the feeling that he had got the best of her after all.