ot a hideous assumption, like the
geniality that often prevails, fitfully, at Christmas time.

But Claude could not permit his hostess to remain comfortable in this
utterly erroneous belief.

"Oh, please--" he said, with gentle rebuke, "I am not happy anywhere."

Miss Haddon glanced at him with a gay and whimsical, but decidedly
acute, scrutiny.

"Perhaps you are too young to be happy," she said; "you have not
suffered enough."

"I have never been young," he answered, eating his devilled kidney with
a silent pathos of perseverance--"never."

"And I shall never be old, or, at any rate, feel old. It can't be done.
I'm sixty-four, and look it, but I can't cease to revel in details, take
an interest in people, and regard life as my half-opened oyster. It is a
pity one can't go on living till one is two or three hundred or so.
There is so much to see and know. Our existence in the world is like a
day at the Stores. We have to go away before we have been into a
quarter of the different departments."

"I don't find life at all like that. I have seen all the departments
till I am sick of them. But perhaps you never come to London?"

"Every year for three months to see my friends. I stay at an hotel. It
is a most delightful time."

Her tone was warm with pleasant memories. Claude felt himself more and
more surprised.

"You enjoy the country, and London?" he said.

"I enjoy everything," said Miss Haddon. "And surely most people do."

"None of the people I know seem to enjoy anything very much. They try
everything, of course. That is one's duty."

"Then the latest literature really reflects life, I imagine," Miss
Haddon said. "If what you say is true, everything includes the sins as
well as the virtues. I have often wondered whether the books that I have
thought utterly and absurdly false could possibly be the outcome of
facts."

"Such as what books?"

"Oh, I'll name no names. The authors may be your personal friends. But
it is so then? In their search after happiness the people of to-day, the
moderns, give the warm shoulder to vice as well as to virtue?"

"They ignore nothing."

"Not even duty?"

"Our duty is to ourselves, and can never be ignored."

Miss Haddon tapped a boiled egg very sharply on its head with a spoon.
She wondered if the action were a performance of duty to herself or to
the egg.

"That, I understand," she remarked briskly, "is the doctrine of what is
called in London the young decade