He rose restlessly, and in rising his eye fell upon the little clock on the mantel.

“Good heavens!” broke from him.  “I had no idea it was so late!  I must go directly.  Directly.”

“Oh, no, you mustn’t think of it.  Your visit to me has just begun—­all this time you have been calling on Beverley Byrd.”

“Why do you think I came here to-night?” he asked abruptly.

Sharlee, from her large chair, smiled. “I think to see me.”

“Oh!—­Yes, naturally, but—­”

“Well, I think this is the call plainly due me from my Reunion party last year.”

“No!  Not at all!  At the same time, it has been since that day that I have had you on my mind so much.”

He said this in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice, but a certain nervousness had broken through into his manner.  He took a turn up and down the room, and returned suddenly to his seat.

“Oh, have you had me on your mind?”

“Do you remember my saying that day,” he began, resolutely, “that I was not sure whether I had got the better of you or you had got the better of me?”

“I remember very well.”

“Well, I have come to tell you that—­you have won.”

He had plucked a pencil from the arsenal of them in his breast-pocket, and with it was beating a noiseless tattoo on his open left palm.  With an effort he met her eyes.

“I say you were right,” came from him nervously.  “Don’t you hear?”

“Was I?  Won’t you tell me just what you mean?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Really I don’t think I do.  You see, when I used that expression that day, I was speaking only of the editorship—­”

“But I was speaking of a theory of life.  After all, the two things seem to have been bound together rather closely—­just as you said.”

He restored his pencil to his pocket, palpably pulled himself together, and proceeded: 

“Oh, my theory was wholly rational—­far more rational than yours; rationally it was perfect.  It was a wholly logical recoil from the idleness, the lack of purpose, the slipshod self-indulgence under many names that I saw, and see, everywhere about me.  I have work to do—­serious work of large importance—­and it seemed to me my duty to carry it through at all hazards.  I need not add that it still seems so.  Yet it was a life’s work, already well along, and there was no need for me to pay an excessive price for mere speed.  I elected to let everything go but intellect; I felt that I must do so; and in consequence, by the simplest sort of natural law, all the rest of me was shriveling up—­had shriveled up, you will say.  Yet I knew very well that my intellect was not the biggest part of me.  I have always understood that....  Still, it seems that I required you to rediscover it for me in terms of everyday life....”

“No, no!” she interrupted, “I didn’t do that.  Most of it you did yourself.  The start, the first push—­don’t you know?—­it came from Fifi.”