on like you."

"Of course you are," said Anthony, with affability.

"I suppose," he thought, "it's because she is what they call a
pronounced personality,--though that does n't seem a very flattering
description. I suppose it's her odylic force."

Adrian selected a second egg, and placed it in his egg-cup.

"You live, you move, you have a sort of being," he said, as he operated
upon the egg-shell; "and, apparently, you live contented. Yet, be
apprised by me, you live in the manner of the beasts that perish. For
the whole excuse, warrant, purpose, and business of life, you treat as
alien to your equation."

"The business of life I entrust to my eminently competent man of
business," said Anthony, with a bow.

"She 's so magnificently vivid," he thought. "That white skin of hers,
and the red lips, and the white teeth; that cloud of black hair, and
the sweep of it as it leaves her brow; and then those luminous, lucid,
glowing, glowing eyes--that last smile of them, before she went away!
She gives one such a sense of intense vitality, of withheld power, of
unknown possibilities."

Adrian, with some expenditure of pains, extracted the spine from a
grilled sardine.

"These children of the inconstant wave," he mused, "these captives from
the inscrutable depths of ocean--the cook ought to bone them before she
sends them to table, ought n't she? _Labor et amor_. The warrant for
life is labour, and the business of life is love."

"You should address your complaints to the cook in person," said
Anthony.

"That's it--unknown possibilities," he thought. "She 's vivid, but she
is n't obvious. It's a vividness that is all reserves--that hints, but
does n't tell. It's the vividness of the South, of the Italy that
produced her,--'Italy, whose work still serves the world for miracle.'
She's vivid, but not in primary colours. I defy you, for example, to
find the word for her--the word that would make her visible to one who
had never seen her."

"They 're immensely improved by a drop or two of Worcester sauce," said
Adrian, with his mouth full. "Observe how, in the labyrinth of
destiny, journeys end in the most romantic and improbable conjunctions.
These fishlets from a southern sea--this sauce from a northern
manufacturing town."

"And then her figure," thought Anthony; "that superb, tall, pliant
figure,--the flow of it, the spring of it,--the lines it takes when she
moves, when she walks,--its extraordinary unio