irst time, a little interested.

"How do you deduce that?"

"Oh!... It is loose, if you like--but I deduce it from what you have
said--and implied--about your father and--having friends."

But what she thought of, most of all, was the case of Fifi.

She stood across the table, facing him, looking down at him; and there
was a faintly heightened color in her cheeks. Her eyes were the clearest
lapis lazuli, heavily fringed with lashes which were blacker than
Egypt's night. Her chin was finely and strongly cut; almost a masculine
chin, but unmasculinely softened by the sweetness of her mouth.

Mr. Queed eyed her with some impatience through his round spectacles.

"You apparently jumble together the theory and what you take to be the
application of a science in the attempt to make an impossible unit.
Hence your curious confusion. Theory and application are as totally
distinct as the poles. The few must discover for the many to use. My own
task--since the matter appears to interest you--is to work out the laws
of human society for those who come after to practice and apply."

"And suppose those who come after feel the same unwillingness to
practice and apply that you, let us say, feel?"

"It becomes the business of government to persuade them."

"And if government shirks also? What is government but the common
expression of masses of individuals very much like yourself?"

"There you return, you see, to your fundamental error. There are very
few individuals in the least like me. I happen to be writing a book of
great importance, not to myself merely, but to posterity. If I fail to
finish my book, if I am delayed in finishing it, I can hardly doubt that
the world will be the loser. This is not a task like organizing a
prolonged search for one's father, or dawdling with friends, which a
million men can do equally well. I alone can write my book. Perhaps you
now grasp my duty of concentrating all my time and energy on this single
work and ruthlessly eliminating whatever interferes with it."

The girl found his incredible egoism at once amusing and extremely
exasperating.

"Have you ever thought," she asked, "that thousands of other
self-absorbed men have considered their own particular work of supreme
importance, and that most of them have been--mistaken?"

"Really I have nothing to do with other men's mistakes. I am responsible
only for my own."

"And that is why it is a temptation to suggest that conceivably you