o battle or set us to building churches. The simple spirit of
contemplation we've come to regard as a pauperising habit and it puts us
out of patience. Great poetry grows out of quiet and nobody is quiet any
longer--a thought no sooner creeps into our head than we begin to talk
about it at the top of our voice."

The branched candlestick at the end of the table shed a glimmering,
pearly light upon his face, and Kemper, as he watched him critically,
was struck suddenly by the fact that Adams was no longer young. He could
not be over forty, yet his features had the drawn and pallid look of a
man who has known, not only ill health, but the shock of emotional
catastrophes. Physically he appeared worn to the point of exhaustion,
but if there was pathos in the slight, elastic figure, there was also an
impression of power for which the other found it impossible to account.
By mere bodily force Kemper could have thrown Adams from the window with
one hand, he realised with a perfectly amiable self-congratulation--yet
in Adams' presence he invariably felt himself to be the weaker
man, and the attitude he unconsciously adopted showed an almost
boyish recognition of a superior intelligence. Something in Roger
Adams--a quality which was neither brute strength nor imperious
personality--exerted a power which Kemper generously admitted to be
greater even than these. Nothing in the man was conspicuous--he
exercised no dominant magnetism--but the invisible spirit which
controlled his life, controlled also, in a measure, the thoughts of
those who came directly beneath his influence. Was it true, Kemper now
wondered, as Perry Bridewell had once declared with unspeakable mirth,
that the thing he liked in Adams was, after all, merely simple goodness
in a manifest form? Goodness in a masculine personality had always
appeared to Kemper to be ridiculously out of place--a masquerading
feminised virtue--but at this instant as he drank to Adams' health
across the carnations, he felt again the power of an attraction which
possessed a sweetness that made his past "wine and honey" sicken in his
memory. "Is it possible that what I admire in this man is the quality I
have laughed at all my life?" he found himself asking suddenly; and the
power of self-restraint, the grace of denial, the strength which could
do without, though it could not take the thing it wanted, the quietness
of sacrifice, the sweetened humour that is learned only in sorrow--these
s