"By no means. He's the most conventional chap we have met since we left the Chelsea Arts Club. What singles him out from so many others is that he saw where he fitted. And it so happened that he fitted somewhere below that to which he would supposedly climb. Consider! Most of us never attain to the position to which we imagine it has pleased God to call us. We are perpetually struggling to succeed. We 'get on in the world,' it is true, but only comparatively. To hear some of us talk, you'd think the world itself wasn't made sufficiently large and well-furnished to supply us with the position we are designed to fill. But Mr. Carville looks, not higher, but lower. He espies the particular niche which suits him perfectly, and he calmly descends a few rungs of the ladder and steps off into oblivion. Not the niche, mind you, that the world might estimate as his, and which would procure for him the guerdon of wealth and fame and posthumous biographies; but the niche which he conceives to contain for him all that he, according to some highly original conception of ultimate justice, deserves. As for England being 'on the crumble,' I consider it a conservative description of what has been going on in that country for years. In most departments of life England has crumbled, literally crumbled away. What Mr. Carville omits is the emergence of the new England, an England he doesn't like, an England we shall probably find hard to assimilate and which may quite conceivably drive us to do what Mr. Carville has sagely done already--come back here and stop for good!" So we talked! At least, I talked and my friend concurred, or demurred, or very often digested my wisdom in silence--the silence that, betwixt friends, means as much or even more than speech. And I remember, one still evening, the patches of dry snow lying on the grass of the sidewalk and the lawns, as we came wearily up Van Diemen's Avenue after a tramp to Echo Lake, there had been a long silence after I had been theorizing on the subject of Mrs. Carville. I am always listened to indulgently on the subject of women! It is tacitly taken for granted that my knowledge of the subject is exclusively theoretical. I do not contest this, because the converse of the proposition, that all married men are practical experts, is so absurd that nobody ventures to state it. I had been discussing Mrs. Carville and the probable effect of American life upon her when she should have more leisure to cultivate herself. My point was that she might possibly have some influence upon her husband. And this was followed, as I have said, by a long silence. "No," said Mac, at length, "I don't think so." I had almost forgotten what we were talking about, for I could already see that the lamps in the dining-room were lighted and shadows moving on the blind. "Oh!" I said. "Why not?"