When this was all settled Jaffery proclaimed himself the most care-free fellow alive.  His hitherto grumpy and resentful attitude towards Liosha changed.  He established himself as fellow slave with her under the whip of Susan’s tyranny.  It did one good to see these two magnificent creatures sporting together for the child’s, and incidentally their own, amusement.  For the first time during their intercourse they met on the same plane.

“She’s really quite a good sort,” said Jaffery.

But if it was pleasant to see him with Liosha, it was still more touching to watch his protective attitude towards Doria.  He seemed so anxious to do her service, so deferential to her views, so puzzle-headedly eager to reconcile them with his own.  She took upon herself to read him little lectures.

“Don’t you think you’re rather wasting your life?” she asked him one day.

“Do you think I am?”

“Yes.”

“Oh!  But I work hard at my job, you know,” he said apologetically—­“when there’s one for me to do.  And when there isn’t I kind of prepare myself for the next.  For instance I’ve got to keep myself always fit.”

“But that’s all physical and outside.”  She smiled, in her little superior way.  “It’s the inside, the personal, the essential self that matters.  Life, properly understood, is a process of self-development.  If a human being is the same at the end of a year as he was at the beginning he has made no spiritual progress.”

Jaffery pulled his red beard.  “In other words, he hasn’t lived,” said he.

“Precisely.”

“And you think that I’m just the same sort of old animal from one year’s end to another and that I don’t progress worth a cent, and so, that I don’t live.”

“I don’t want to say quite that,” she replied graciously.  “Every one must advance a little bit unless they deteriorate.  But the conscious striving after spiritual progress is so necessary—­and you seem to put it aside.  It is such waste of life.”

“I suppose it is, in a way,” Jaffery admitted.

She pursued the theme, a flattered Egeria.  “You see—­well, what do you do?  You travel about in out-of-the-way places and make notes about them in case the knowledge may be useful to you in the future.  When you come across anything to kill, you kill it.  It also pleases you to come across anything that calls for an exercise of strength.  When there is a war or a revolution or anything that takes you to your real work, as you call it, you’ve only got to go through it and report what you see.”

“But that’s just the difficulty,” cried Jaffery.  “It isn’t every chap that’s tough enough to come out rosy at the end of a campaign.  And it isn’t every chap that can see the things he ought to write about.  That’s when the training comes in.”

Again she smiled.  “I’ve no idea of belittling your profession, my dear Jaffery.  I think it’s a noble one.  But should it be the Alpha and Omega of things?  Don’t you see?  The real life is intellectual, spiritual, emotional.  What are your ideals?”