h (to his mind)
conventions were all right if you found the market--but to say that
England was "on the crumble" was silly. And to harp on gentility ... Mac
shook his head.

"But that is one of the stones he had to remove to make his hole in the
wall," I argued.

"Then your wonderful hole in the wall is only our old friend the Door of
Unconventionality," he retorted.

"By no means. He's the most conventional chap we have met since we left
the Chelsea Arts Club. What singles him out from so many others is that
he saw where he fitted. And it so happened that he fitted somewhere
below that to which he would supposedly climb. Consider! Most of us
never attain to the position to which we imagine it has pleased God to
call us. We are perpetually struggling to succeed. We 'get on in the
world,' it is true, but only comparatively. To hear some of us talk,
you'd think the world itself wasn't made sufficiently large and
well-furnished to supply us with the position we are designed to fill.
But Mr. Carville looks, not higher, but lower. He espies the particular
niche which suits him perfectly, and he calmly descends a few rungs of
the ladder and steps off into oblivion. Not the niche, mind you, that
the world might estimate as his, and which would procure for him the
guerdon of wealth and fame and posthumous biographies; but the niche
which he conceives to contain for him all that he, according to some
highly original conception of ultimate justice, deserves. As for England
being 'on the crumble,' I consider it a conservative description of what
has been going on in that country for years. In most departments of life
England has crumbled, literally crumbled away. What Mr. Carville omits
is the emergence of the new England, an England he doesn't like, an
England we shall probably find hard to assimilate and which may quite
conceivably drive us to do what Mr. Carville has sagely done
already--come back here and stop for good!"

So we talked! At least, I talked and my friend concurred, or demurred,
or very often digested my wisdom in silence--the silence that, betwixt
friends, means as much or even more than speech. And I remember, one
still evening, the patches of dry snow lying on the grass of the
sidewalk and the lawns, as we came wearily up Van Diemen's Avenue after
a tramp to Echo Lake, there had been a long silence after I had been
theorizing on the subject of Mrs. Carville. I am always listened to
indulgently on the subje