busy till I gave up work. Before, I was often bored; now, the day is
never long enough for all I have to do."

"But that is a dreadful confession," I said; "and how do you justify
yourself for this miserable indifference to all that is held to be of
importance?"

"Listen!" he said, smiling and holding up his hand. There floated up
out of the wood the soft crooning of a dove, like the over-brimming of
a tide of content. "There's the answer," he added. "How does that
dove justify his existence? and yet he has not much on his mind."

"I have no answer ready," I said, "though there is one, I am sure, if
you will only give me time; but let that come later: more questions
first, and then I will deliver judgment. Now, attend to this
seriously," I said. "How do you justify it that you are alone in the
world, not mated, not a good husband and father? The dove has not got
that on his conscience."

"Ah!" said my friend, "I have often asked myself that. But for many
years I had not the time to fall in love; if I had been an idle man it
would have been different, and now that I am free--well, I regard it
as, on the whole, a wise dispensation. I have no domestic virtues; I
am a pretty commonplace person, and I think there is no reason why I
should perpetuate my own feeble qualities, bind my dull qualities up
closer with the life of the world. Besides, I have a theory that the
world is made now very much as it was in the Middle Ages. There was
but one choice then--a soldier or a monk. Now, I have no combative
blood in me; I hate a row; I am a monk to the marrow of my bones, and
the monks are the failures from the point of view of race. No monk
should breed monks; there are enough of his kind in the hive already."

"You a monk?" said I, laughing. "Why, you are nothing of the kind; you
are just the sort of man for an adoring wife and a handful of big
children. I must have a better answer."

"Well, then," said he, rather seriously, "I will give you a better
answer. There are some people whose affections are made to run, strong
and straight, in a narrow channel. The world holds but one woman for a
man of that type, and it is his business to find her; but there are
others, and I am one, who dribble away their love in a hundred
channels--in art, in nature, among friends. To speak frankly, I have
had a hundred such passions. I made friends as a boy, quickly and
romantically, with all kinds of people--some old, some y