ple (especially, perhaps, things and people that
obstinately resist) part of our own domain--their currency coinage of
ours, with the stamp of our mint, bearing our superscription--causing
the writ of our issuing to run where it did not run before--is not this,
however ill-expressed (and bigger men than I have failed, and will fail,
fully to express it), something like what the human spirit attempts? Or
is there, too, a true gospel of drawing in--of renouncing? In the
essential, mind you!--It is easy in trifles, in indulgences and
luxuries. But to surrender the exercise and expansion of self?

If that be right, if that be true--at any rate it was not Jenny Driver.
She was a strong, natural-born swimmer, cast now for the first time into
open sea--after the duck ponds of her Smalls and her Simpsons. It was
not the smooth waters which tested, tried, or in innermost truth
delighted her most.

All this in a very tiny corner? Of course. Will you find me anywhere
that is not a corner, please? Alexander worked in one, and Caesar. "What
does it matter then what I do?" "No more," I must answer, being no
philosopher and therefore unprepared with a theory, "than it matters
whether or not you are squashed under yonder train. But if you think--on
your own account--that the one matters, why, for all we can say, perhaps
the other does."

That duck pond of the Simpsons'! By apparent chance--it may be, in fact,
by some unusual receptivity in my own bearing--that very day Chat talked
to me about it. I had grown friendlier toward Chat, having perceived
that the cunning in her--(it was there, and refuted Cartmell's charge of
mere foolishness)--ran to no more than a decent selfishness, informed by
years of study of Jenny, deflected by a spinsterish admiration of
Octon's claim to unquestioned male dominion. Her reason said--"We are
very well as we are. I am comfortable. I am 'putting by.' Jenny's
marriage might make things worse." The spinster added, "But this must
end some day. Let it end--when it must--in an irresistible (perhaps to
Chat's imagination a rather lurid) conquest." Paradoxically her instinct
(for if anything be an instinct, selfishness is) squared with what I had
deciphered of Jenny's strategy--in immediate action at least. Chat would
not have Octon shown the door; neither would she set him at the head of
the table--just yet. Being comfortable, she abhorred all chance of
convulsions--as Jenny, being powerful, resented all thr