les were of hammered iron, and whose
halls were of inlaid marble. When he needed attendance, coals, his
letters, a meal, a messenger or a carriage, he pressed an electric
button and his wants were satisfied almost as swiftly as even petulant
wealth could expect. An exceedingly swift lift bore him to and from his
rooms, and in his rooms he had gathered about him all that his eye
desired--books in rich cases with felted hinges, ivories from all the
world, rugs, lamps, cushions, couches, engravings and rings with
engravings upon them, miniatures of pretty women, scientific toys and
china from Persia. He had friends and acquaintances as many as he could
befriend or know; and some said that more than one woman had given him
her whole love. Therefore, he could have lacked nothing whatever.

One day a hot sickness touched him with its finger, and he became no
more than a sick man alone among his possessions, the sport of dreams
and devils and shadows, sometimes a log and sometimes a lunatic crying
in delirium. Before his friends forsook him altogether, as healthy
brutes will forsake the wounded, they saw that he was efficiently
doctored, and the expensive physician who called upon him at first three
times a day, and later only once, caused him to be nursed by a nun.
"Science is good," said the physician, "but for steady, continuous
nursing, with no science in it, Religion is better--and I know Sister
Ursula."

So this sick man was nursed by a nun, young and fairly pretty, but,
above all, skilful. When he got better he would give the convent, and
not Sister Ursula, a thankoffering which would be spent among the poor
whom Sister Ursula chiefly attended. At first the man knew nothing of
the nun's existence--he was in the country beyond all creeds--but later
a white coifed face came and went across his visions, and at last, spent
and broken, he woke to see a very quiet young woman in black moving
about his room. He was too weak to speak: too weak almost to cling to
life any more. In his despair he thought that it was not worth clinging
to; but the woman was at least a woman and alive. The touch of her
fingers in his as she gave him the medicine was warm. She testified to
the existence of a world full of women also alive--the world he was
beginning to disbelieve in. He watched her sitting in the sunshine by
the window, and counted the light creeping down from bead to bead of the
rosary at her waist. They then moved his bed to the