now wondered, as Perry Bridewell had once declared with unspeakable mirth, that the thing he liked in Adams was, after all, merely simple goodness in a manifest form?  Goodness in a masculine personality had always appeared to Kemper to be ridiculously out of place—­a masquerading feminised virtue—­but at this instant as he drank to Adams’ health across the carnations, he felt again the power of an attraction which possessed a sweetness that made his past “wine and honey” sicken in his memory.  “Is it possible that what I admire in this man is the quality I have laughed at all my life?” he found himself asking suddenly; and the power of self-restraint, the grace of denial, the strength which could do without, though it could not take the thing it wanted, the quietness of sacrifice, the sweetened humour that is learned only in sorrow—­these showed to him at the moment in a singularly new and vivid light.  “I know nothing of his life except that he has had courage,” he thought again, “yet because of this one thing—­and because, too, of a quality which I recognise, though I cannot name it, I would trust him sooner than any man or woman whom I know—­sooner, by Jove, than I would trust myself.”  Among his many generous traits was the ability to appreciate keenly where he could not follow, to apprehend almost instinctively the finer attributes of the spirit, and though he himself preferred the pleasures of the senses to the vaguer comforts of philosophy, he was not without a profound admiration for the man who, as he believed, had deliberately chosen to forfeit the joy of life.  Roger Adams impressed him to-night as a peculiarly happy man—­not with the hectic happiness he himself had sought—­but with a secure, a reposeful, an indestructible possession—­the happiness which comes not through the illusion of desire, but which is bound up in the peace of an eternal reconciliation.  The man beyond the carnations, he knew by an intuition surer than knowledge, had never even for an hour dallied in the primrose path where his own pursuit of delight had begun and ended—­he could not imagine Adams’ control yielding to a fleeting impulse of passion—­yet had not the very power he recognised come to his friend in the stony places through which he had been constrained to walk with God?  Sitting there Kemper was brought suddenly for the first time in his life face to face with the profoundest truth that lies hidden in the deeps of knowledge—­that renunciation may become the richest experience in the consciousness of man; that to renounce for the sake of goodness is not merely to refrain from sin but to achieve virtue; and that he who gives up his happiness and is still happy has gained not only the beauty of his forfeited joys, but has added to his own a strength that is equal to the strength of his unfulfilled desire.  Kemper had always believed himself strong because he had attained, yet he knew now that Adams was stronger than he inasmuch as he had gone without for the sake of his own soul.