'

'I should have thought,' replied Rhoda, elevating her eyebrows, 'that
to live alone was the less of two evils.'

'Undoubtedly. But men like these two we have been speaking of haven't a
very logical mind.'

Miss Barfoot changed the topic.

When, not long after, the ladies left him to meditate over his glass of
wine, Everard curiously surveyed the room. Then his eyelids drooped, he
smiled absently, and a calm sigh seemed to relieve his chest. The
claret had no particular quality to recommend it, and in any case he
would have drunk very little, for as regards the bottle his nature was
abstemious.

'It is as I expected,' Miss Barfoot was saying to her friend in the
drawing-room. 'He has changed very noticeably.'

'Mr. Barfoot isn't quite the man your remarks had suggested to me,'
Rhoda replied.

'I fancy he is no longer the man I knew. His manners are wonderfully
improved. He used to assert himself in rather alarming ways. His
letter, to be sure, had the old tone, or something of it.'

'I will go to the library for an hour,' said Rhoda, who had not seated
herself. 'Mr. Barfoot won't leave before ten, I suppose?'

'I don't think there will be any private talk.'

'Still, if you will let me--'

So, when Everard appeared, he found his cousin alone.

'What are you going to do?' she asked of him good-naturedly.

'To do? You mean, how do I propose to employ myself? I have nothing
whatever in view, beyond enjoying life.'

'At your age?'

'So young? Or so old? Which?'

'So young, of course. You deliberately intend to waste your life?'

'To enjoy it, I said. I am not prompted to any business or profession;
that's all over for me; I have learnt all I care to of the active
world.'

'But what do you understand by enjoyment?' asked Miss Barfoot, with
knitted brows.

'Isn't the spectacle of existence quite enough to occupy one through a
lifetime? If a man merely travelled, could he possibly exhaust all the
beauties and magnificences that are offered to him in every country?
For ten years and more I worked as hard as any man; I shall never
regret it, for it has given me a feeling of liberty and opportunity
such as I should not have known if I had always lived at my ease. It
taught me a great deal, too; supplemented my so-called education as
nothing else could have done. But to work for ever is to lose half of
life. I can't understand those people who reconcile themselves to
quitting the world without having see