"Is fullness of life," cut in Sydney. "That's an axiom, like the being of a feeling is its being felt, and that other, about the _esse_ of a thing's being _percipi_. Anyway, he had it, fullness of life. But it lands you in the Uebermensch, all the same, and _he_ is a fearful brute." Mechanically Esther murmured: "Nonsense, the Uebermensch is the Magnanimous Man, essentially." "He's not a bit. Anyway, I don't believe you can work equations like that," replied Sydney, stretching up one hand pink against the fire. "I don't think the Magnanimous Man is the opposite of Marius and I know he isn't the same as the Uebermensch, even temperamentally. He risked greatly for great ends: Marius of course never risked at all but the Uebermensch is always chancing it for no particular reason. He doesn't go in for final causes, does he? Please, between them I prefer the Aristotelian,--but not to know personally. It's bound to end in hardness." "In the last analysis, your soul's your own," declared Esther with a habitual gesture of wrapping her gown about her, but the other broke in with a little cry: "Ah, but it isn't! It's every one's else, in the last analysis." "But it is not really so good in the long run even for the other people, that _Tristem Neminem Fecit_. Remember Jane Barry, what she gave up for her people; they hadn't a thing against the man, but they couldn't spare her. Now they have an invalid, and when I was there at Christmas I noticed a very real hardness, which wasn't in the least pretty." Sydney answered with a candour almost noble: "Really, of course, one should only make great renouncements on one's deathbed." "Do you suppose that if Marlowe came by to-morrow and said: 'Chuck the degree, chuck Sydney there on the hearthrug, and come for a walk around the world,' I shouldn't go?" "I suppose you would go, 'still climbing after knowledge infinite.' But then you've no ties," finished Sydney, strong in the recollection of a father, a mother and several brothers and sisters. "Don't you call yourself a tie?" laughed Esther. "I believe you would go," Sydney repeated with a note of regretful admiration. "Now I pray I should have grace to reply: 'Thank you kindly, sir, but I'm bespoke.' I mean, if you had broken your back, for instance, or gone blind." In an old oval mirror on the opposite wall Esther Lawes regarded for an instant her own fair strength, and the large grey eyes a little too clear and bright and round; from year to year they used to give out. "I believe you would," she echoed, gazing down with her usual pleased sense of Sydney's beauty. Never did girl better match than Sydney Lodge her gracious name, radiant, the very sound of it, with sylvan and romantic suggestions. Her slimness had the graceless grace of Shakespeare's disguised heroines; her curls, of hair the most golden red, prompted the quaint Elizabethan epithet of "gold wires"; and her academic gown sat as straightly on her as the Oread's coat of sycamore bark.