at I understand or what I do not
understand. Tell me what it is that worries you in that letter."

He pushed it away from him impatiently.

"I asked a friend--a man named Chambers--to put me up for a club I
wanted to join," he said. "He promised to do his best. I have just
received a letter advising me to withdraw. The committee would not
elect me."

"What club is it?" she asked.

"The 'Wanderers'," he answered. "The social qualification is not very
stringent. I imagined that they would elect me."

The woman looked at him as one seeking to understand some creature of
an alien world.

"You attach importance," she asked, "to such an incident as this?
You?"

"Not real importance, perhaps," he answered, "only you must remember
that these are the small things that annoy. They amount to nothing
really. I know that. And yet they sting!"

"Do not dwell upon the small things, then," she said coldly. "It is
well, for all our sakes, that you should occupy some position in the
social world, but it is also well that you should remember that your
position there is not worth a snap of the fingers as against the great
things which you and I know of. What do these people matter, with
their strange ideas of birth and position, their little social
distinctions, which remind one of nothing so much as Swift's famous
satire? You are losing your sense of proportion, my dear Bertrand. Go
into your study for an hour this morning, and think. Listen to the
voices of the greater life. Remember that all these small happenings
are of less account than the flight of a bird on a summer's day."

"You are right," he answered, with a little sigh, "and yet you must
remember that you and I can scarcely look at things from the same
standpoint. They do not affect you in the slightest. They cannot fail
to remind me that I am after all an outcast, rescued from shipwreck by
one strange turn in the wheel of chance."

She looked at him with penetrating eyes.

"Something is happening to you, Bertrand," she said. "It may be that
it is your sense of proportion which is at fault. It may be that your
head is a little turned by the greatness of the task which it has
fallen to your lot to carry out. It is true that you are a young man,
and that I am an old woman. And yet, remember! We are both of us
little live atoms in the great world. The only things which can appeal
to us in a different manner are the everyday things which should not
count, which shoul