“Well,” he said slowly, “what was Fifi but you again in miniature?”

“A great deal else,” said Sharlee.

Her gaze fell.  She sunk her chin upon her hand, and a silence followed, while before the mind’s eye of each rose a vision of Fifi, with her wasted cheeks and great eyes.

“As I say, I sacrificed everything to reason,” continued Queed, obviously struggling against embarrassment, “and yet pure reason was never my ideal.  I have impressed you as a thoroughly selfish person—­you have told me that—­and so far as my immediate environment is concerned, I have been, and am.  So it may surprise you to be told that a life of service has been from the beginning my ambition and my star.  Of course I have always interpreted service in the broadest sense, in terms of the world; that was why I deliberately excluded all purely personal applications of it.  Yet it is from a proper combination of reason with—­the sociologist’s ’consciousness of kind’—­fellow-feeling, sympathy, if you prefer, that is derived a life of fullest efficiency.  I have always understood the truth of this formula as applied to peoples.  It seems that I—­rather missed its force as to individuals.  I—­I am ready to admit that an individual life can draw an added meaning—­and richness from a service, not of the future, but of the present—­not of the race but ... well, of the unfortunate on the doorstep.  Do you understand,” he asked abruptly, “what I am trying to tell you?”

She assured him that she understood perfectly.

A slow painful color came into his face.

“Then you appreciate the nature and the size of the debt I owe you.”

“Oh, no, no, no!  If I have done anything at all to help you,” said Sharlee, considerably moved, “then I am very glad and proud.  But as for what you speak of ... no, no, people always do these things for themselves.  The help comes from within—­”

“Oh, don’t talk like that!” broke from him.  “You throw out the idea somehow that I consider that I have undergone some remarkable conversion and transformation.  I haven’t done anything of the sort.  I am just the same as I always was.  Just the same....  Only now I am willing to admit, as a scientific truth, that time given to things not in themselves directly productive, can be made to pay a good dividend.  If what I said led you to think that I meant more than that, then I have, for once, expressed myself badly.  I tell you this,” he went on hurriedly, “simply because you once interested yourself in trying to convince me of the truth of these views.  Some of the things you said that night managed to stick.  They managed to stick.  Oh, I give you that.  I suppose you might say that they gradually became like mottoes or texts—­not scientific, of course ... personal.  Therefore, I thought it only fair to tell you that while my cosmos is still mostly Ego—­I suppose everybody’s is in one way or another—­I have—­made changes, so that I am no longer wholly out of relation with life.”