plied. "Show
me a free man. Where is there such? We're all slaves. Only some of us
are too stupid to recognize our status."

"Slaves to what?" Myra asked. "You seem to have come back in a
decidedly pessimistic frame of mind."

"Slaves to our own necessities; to other people's demands; to burdens
we have assumed, or have had thrust upon us, which we haven't the
courage to shake off. To our own moods and passions. To something
within us that keeps us pursuing this thing we call happiness. To
struggle for fulfilment of ideals that can never be attained. Slaves
to our environment, to social forces before which the individual is
nothing. It's all rot to talk about the free man, the man whose soul
is his own. Complete freedom isn't even desirable, because to attain
it you would have to withdraw yourself altogether from your fellows
and become a law unto yourself in some remote solitude; and no sane
person wants to do that, even to secure this mythical freedom which
people prattle about and would recoil from if it were offered them.
Yes, I'll have another cup, if you please, Mrs. Hollister."

Lawanne munched cake and drank tea and talked as if he had been denied
the boon of conversation for a long time. But that could hardly be,
for he had been across the continent since he left there. He had been
in New York and Washington and swung back to British Columbia by way
of San Francisco.

"I read those two books of yours--or rather Bob read them to me,"
Doris said presently. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself for writing
such a preposterous yarn as 'The Worm'."

"Ah, my dear woman," Lawanne's face lit up with a sardonic smile. "I
wish my publishers could hear you say that. 'The Worm' is good, sound,
trade union goods, turned out in the very best manner of a thriving
school of fictionsmiths. It sold thirty thousand copies in the regular
edition and tons in the reprint."

"But there never were such invincible men and such a perfect creature
of a woman," Doris persisted. "And the things they did--the strings
you pulled. Life isn't like that. You know it isn't."

"Granted," Lawanne returned dryly. "But what did you think of 'The Man
Who Couldn't Die'?"

"It didn't seem to me," Doris said slowly, "that the man who wrote the
last book could possibly have written the first. That _was_ life. Your
man there was a real man, and you made his hopes and fears, his love
and sufferings, very vivid. Your woman was real enough too, but