n of strength with
fineness."

"The longest night," said Adrian, "is followed by a dawn." He dropped
three lumps of sugar into his tea-cup. "There 's a paragraph in this
week's _Beaux and Belles_ which says that sugar in tea is quite the
correct thing again. Thank mercy. Tongue can never tell the
hankerings my sweet-tooth has suffered during the years that sugar has
been unfashionable.

"Nearest neighbours though they dwell,
Neighbour Tongue can never tell
What Neighbour Tooth has had to dree,
Nearest neighbours though they be,"

he softly hummed. "But that's really from a poem about toothache, and
does n't perhaps apply. Do _you_ labour? Do _you_ love?" he enquired.

"Love is such an ambiguous term," said Anthony, with languor.

"Yes--strength and fineness: those are her insistent notes," he was
thinking. "She is strong, strong. She is strong as a perfect young
animal is strong. Yet she is fine. She is fine as only, of all
created beings, a fine woman can be fine--a woman delicate, sensitive,
high-bred, fine in herself, and with all her belongings fine."

"Life," said Adrian, "is a thing a man should come by honestly; a thing
the possession of which a man should justify; a thing a man should
earn."

"Some favoured individuals, I have heard, inherit it from their
forebears," said Anthony, as one loth to dogmatise, on the tone of a
mere suggestion.

"Pish," answered Adrian, with absoluteness. "Our forebears affect my
thesis only in so far as they did not forbear. At most, they touched
the button. The rest--the adventurous, uncertain, interesting rest--we
must do ourselves. We must _earn_ our life; and then we should _spend_
it--lavishly, like noble, freehanded gentlemen. Well, we earn our life
by labour; and then, if we spend as the gods design, we spend our life
in love. I could quote Browning, I could quote Byron, I could even
quote What's-his-name, the celebrated German."

"You could--but you won't," interposed Anthony, with haste. "It is
excellent to have a giant's strength, but tyrannous to use it like a
giant."

"The puzzling thing, however," he reflected, "is that I can't in the
least realise her as what she is. She is a widow, she has been
married. I can't in the least think of her as a woman who has been
married. Not that she strikes one exactly as a young girl,
either,--she exhibits too plentiful a lack of young-girlish rawness and
insipidity,--she 's a woman, she 's