But the stage had always been his master-passion.  He would have sold his soul for the time and freedom to write plays!  It was in him—­he could not remember when it had not been his deepest-seated instinct.  As the years passed it became a morbid, a relentless obsession—­yet with every year the material conditions were more and more against it.  He felt himself growing middle-aged, and he watched the reflection of the process in his sister’s wasted face.  At eighteen she had been pretty, and as full of enthusiasm as he.  Now she was sour, trivial, insignificant—­she had missed her chance of life.  And she had no resources, poor creature, was fashioned simply for the primitive functions she had been denied the chance to fulfil!  It exasperated him to think of it—­and to reflect that even now a little travel, a little health, a little money, might transform her, make her young and desirable...  The chief fruit of his experience was that there is no such fixed state as age or youth—­there is only health as against sickness, wealth as against poverty; and age or youth as the outcome of the lot one draws.

At this point in his narrative Granice stood up, and went to lean against the mantel-piece, looking down at Ascham, who had not moved from his seat, or changed his attitude of rigid fascinated attention.

“Then came the summer when we went to Wrenfield to be near old Lenman—­my mother’s cousin, as you know.  Some of the family always mounted guard over him—­generally a niece or so.  But that year they were all scattered, and one of the nieces offered to lend us her cottage if we’d relieve her of duty for two months.  It was a nuisance for me, of course, for Wrenfield is two hours from town; but my mother, who was a slave to family observances, had always been good to the old man, so it was natural we should be called on—­and there was the saving of rent and the good air for Kate.  So we went.

“You never knew Joseph Lenman?  Well, picture to yourself an amoeba or some primitive organism of that sort, under a Titan’s microscope.  He was large, undifferentiated, inert—­since I could remember him he had done nothing but take his temperature and read the Churchman.  Oh, and cultivate melons—­that was his hobby.  Not vulgar, out-of-door melons—­his were grown under glass.  He had miles of it at Wrenfield—­his big kitchen-garden was surrounded by blinking battalions of green-houses.  And in nearly all of them melons were grown—­early melons and late, French, English, domestic—­dwarf melons and monsters:  every shape, colour and variety.  They were petted and nursed like children—­a staff of trained attendants waited on them.  I’m not sure they didn’t have a doctor to take their temperature—­at any rate the place was full of thermometers.  And they didn’t sprawl on the ground like ordinary melons; they were trained against the glass like nectarines, and each melon hung in a net which sustained its weight and left it free on all sides to the sun and air...