y with the bright ample day outside, the rapid glint of the
river and the tips of the maple all a-tremble with the urgency of new
growth. The senior partner's eye roved from that to the restrained
richness of the office furniture from which the new was not yet worn,
and returned to the contemplation of the towering white cumuli beginning
to pile up beyond the farther bank of the river. "There's no end to what
a man can lift," he asserted confidently, "once he's got his feet under
him."

"We've carried a lot," Peter assented cheerfully, "and sometimes it was
rather steep going, but now it's carrying us. The question is"--and here
his voice fell off a shade and a slight gathering appeared between his
eyes--"the real question is, I suppose, what it is carrying us _to_."

"Where's the good of that?" Julian protested. "It's only a limitation to
set out for a particular place. The fun is in the going. You keep right
along with the procession until old age gets you. The thing is just to
keep it up as long as you can." He swung himself into a sitting posture
on the edge of the desk and noted that the slight pucker had not left
his partner's eyes. "What's the idea?" he wished affectionately to know.

"Oh, nothing much, but I sort of grew up with the idea of
Duty--something you had to do because there was nobody else to do it.
You had not only to do it but you had to like it, not because it was
likable, but because it was your duty. It was always right in front of
me: I couldn't see over or around it; I just had to do it."

"Well, you did it," Lessing corroborated. "Clarice says the way you've
taken care of Ellen----"

"And the way Ellen has taken care of me--but then Ellen was all the
woman I had." He caught himself up swiftly after that; it was seldom
even to his partner that anything escaped him in reference to the
interior life of dreams which had gone on in him, quite happily behind
his undistinguished exterior. "But somehow it hasn't seemed to come out
anywhere. I've done my duty ... and when I'm dead and Ellen's dead,
where is it? After all, what have I done?"

"Ah, look at Pleasanton," Julian reminded him; "do you call that
nothing?" They looked together toward the esplanade along the river,
beginning at this hour to be flecked with the white aprons of
nurse-maids and their charges. "We've given them clean water to drink
and clean streets, and a safe place for the children to play in. The
fight we had with the city