to watch his protective attitude towards Doria. He seemed so
anxious to do her service, so deferential to her views, so
puzzle-headedly eager to reconcile them with his own. She took upon
herself to read him little lectures.

"Don't you think you're rather wasting your life?" she asked him one
day.

"Do you think I am?"

"Yes."

"Oh! But I work hard at my job, you know," he said apologetically--"when
there's one for me to do. And when there isn't I kind of prepare myself
for the next. For instance I've got to keep myself always fit."

"But that's all physical and outside." She smiled, in her little
superior way. "It's the inside, the personal, the essential self that
matters. Life, properly understood, is a process of self-development. If
a human being is the same at the end of a year as he was at the
beginning he has made no spiritual progress."

Jaffery pulled his red beard. "In other words, he hasn't lived," said
he.

"Precisely."

"And you think that I'm just the same sort of old animal from one year's
end to another and that I don't progress worth a cent, and so, that I
don't live."

"I don't want to say quite that," she replied graciously. "Every one
must advance a little bit unless they deteriorate. But the conscious
striving after spiritual progress is so necessary--and you seem to put
it aside. It is such waste of life."

"I suppose it is, in a way," Jaffery admitted.

She pursued the theme, a flattered Egeria. "You see--well, what do you
do? You travel about in out-of-the-way places and make notes about them
in case the knowledge may be useful to you in the future. When you come
across anything to kill, you kill it. It also pleases you to come across
anything that calls for an exercise of strength. When there is a war or
a revolution or anything that takes you to your real work, as you call
it, you've only got to go through it and report what you see."

"But that's just the difficulty," cried Jaffery. "It isn't every chap
that's tough enough to come out rosy at the end of a campaign. And it
isn't every chap that can _see_ the things he ought to write about.
That's when the training comes in."

Again she smiled. "I've no idea of belittling your profession, my dear
Jaffery. I think it's a noble one. But should it be the Alpha and Omega
of things? Don't you see? The real life is intellectual, spiritual,
emotional. What are your ideals?"

Jaffery looked at her ruefully. Beneath those dark pools