ter dinner he went and sate down by Mrs.
Graves.

"Jack's a nice boy," she said, "very nice--don't make him pert!"

"I am afraid I shan't MAKE him anything," said Howard. "He will go his
own way, sure enough; but he isn't pert--he comes to heel, and he
remembers. He is like the true gentleman--he is never unintentionally
offensive."

Mrs. Graves laughed, and said, "Yes, that is so."

Howard went on, "I have been thinking a great deal about our talk
yesterday, and it's a new light to me. I do not think I fully
understand, but I feel that there is something very big behind it all,
which I want to understand. This great force you speak of--is it an
AIM?"

"That's a good question," said Mrs. Graves. "No, it's not an aim at
all. It's too big for that; an aim is quite on a lower level. There's
no aim in the big things. A man doesn't fall ill with an aim--he
doesn't fall in love with an aim. It just comes upon him."

"But then," said Howard, "is it more than a sort of artistic gift which
some have and many have not? I have known a few real artists, and they
just did not care for anything else in the world. All the rest of life
was just a passing of time, a framework to their work. There was an
artist I knew, who was dying. The doctor asked him if he wanted
anything. 'Just a full day's work,' he said."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "it is like that in a way; it is the one thing
worth doing and being. But it isn't a conscious using of minutes and
opportunities--it isn't a plan; it is just a fulness of life, rejoicing
to live, to see, to interpret, to understand. It doesn't matter what
life you live--it is how you live it. Life is only the cup for the
liquor which must else be spilled. I can only use an old phrase--it is
being 'in the spirit': when you ask whether it is a special gift, of
course some people have it more strongly and consciously than others.
But it is the thing to which we are all tending sooner or later; and
the mysterious thing about it is that so many people do not seem to
know they have it. Yet it is always just the becoming aware of what is
there."

"How do you account for that?" said Howard.

"Why," said Mrs. Graves, "to a great extent because religion is in such
an odd state. It is as if the people who knew or suspected the secret,
did all they could to conceal it--just as parents try to keep their
children ignorant of the ideas of sex. Religion has got so horribly
mixed up with other things, with r