"Once," he began conversationally, "I was passing with a friend through Grosvenor Street. It was when in the spring the tenant's fancy lightly turns to coats of paint, and we came to a ladder leaning against a house that was being redecorated. In stepping to the outer side of the ladder, my friend lifted his hat to it; you may know the superstition? He was a 'Varsity man, a man of considerable attainments. I said, 'Is it possible that you believe in that nonsense?' He said, 'N--no, I don't exactly believe in it, but I never throw away a chance.'" On a sudden his inflexion changed, his utterance was solemn, stirring, devout: "'I think, sir, that most people _pray_ on my friend's principle--they don't believe in it, but they never throw away a chance.'" He had said it before; the whole thing was too assured, too finished, for an impromptu, but the effect of that modulation was superb. All the artist in Conrad responded to it. "And when they are sincere?" he questioned, after a pause; "for they are sometimes. Your walls remind me how passionately I prayed to be a painter. And your own prayers, I take it, came from the soul when you craved to be a poet." "But should I have been more useful as a poet? It wouldn't have contented me to write--let us say--'The Better Land,' and more minds are to be influenced by simple sermons than by great poetry. You think, perhaps, that as a painter you would have been happier. But perhaps you wouldn't. We are often like little children petitioning their parents for the dangerous. I will not suggest that a merciful God chastises us to demonstrate our error, but many an observant man must have noticed the truth that what we have desired most strenuously often proves an affliction to us, while the only sunshine in our lives is shed by the thing which we prayed might never come to pass." "Yes," said Conrad, thoughtfully, "I have seen more than one example of that. But if we are mere blunderers beseeching in the dark--if we are like children importuning their parents without discernment, as you say--isn't the act of prayer futile? Isn't it even presumptuous?" Mr. Irquetson raised his head, his eyes looked upward; "No--pray!" he said, and the melody of his tone gave glory to a commonplace. "Pray," he repeated, and Conrad wanted to kneel to him then, there, on the study floor. "One day perhaps you will afford me an opportunity to make my thoughts on prayer quite clear to you. Pray--but with fervour, and with sense. With humility! Sir, I cannot reconcile my faith in an omniscient Creator with the idea that it is necessary to advise Him we need rain in Rutland ... But I'm withholding the little information that I am able to give you. I was about to say that Mrs. Page, so far as I know, lives still in Malvern--or perhaps it was Matlock; and the eldest girl----" "Mary?" interposed Conrad.