“Then what _is_ your principal object in life?” he asked, watching her intently. “I think, more than anything, I desire education.” His surprise was followed by further suspicion. Her reply sounded too naïve, too moral. He became wary of the latent actress in her. She sat there huddled up, brooding, gazing into the darkness out of haunted eyes. “Do you think an education is really worth this sort of hardship?” he asked. That seemed to interest her. She replied: “I think so.... I don’t know.” “What are you trying to learn?” “The truth ... about things.” “Why don’t you go to school?” “I’ve been through high-school.” “Didn’t you learn the truth about things in high-school?” “I don’t think so.” “Where are you going to learn it then?” She was plainly interested now: “I think the only way is to find out for myself.... I don’t know anybody who can tell me reasons. I like to be told _why_. If I don’t know the facts about life how can I write plays and act them? I _must_ find out. I’m twenty, and I know scarcely anything worth knowing. It is awful. It frightens me. I’m crazy to be somebody. I can’t be unless I learn the truth about things. “There is nobody at home to tell me.... I couldn’t stand it any longer.... I _had_ to find out for myself. Books don’t help. They excite.” She looked at him feverishly: “It is a terrible thing to want only facts,” she said. “Because nothing else satisfies.” He thought, incredulously, “Where did she get that line?” He said: “A taste for Truth spoils one’s appetite for anything else.... So that’s what you’re after, is it? You’re after the truth about things.” She did not reply. He said, always watching her: “When you know the truth what are you going to do with it?” “Act it. Write it.” “Live it, too?” he inquired gravely. She turned to look at him, not comprehending. “Where are you going to get the money to do all this?” he asked lightly. “It is going to be difficult--without money,” she admitted. Something in the situation stirred a perverse sort of humour in him. He didn’t quite believe in her, as she revealed her complexities and her simplicities out of her own mouth. “The love of money is the root of all good,” he remarked. After a silence: “I wonder,” she said thoughtfully. “One needs it to do good ... perhaps to _be_ good.... Nobody can tell, I suppose, what starvation might do to them.... Money _is_ good.” “All things are difficult without money,” he said, pursuing his perverse thesis. “The love of it is not the root of all evil. Money is often salvation. Lack of it fetters effort. Want of it retards fulfilment. Without it ambition is crippled. Aspiration remains a dream. Lacking a penny-worth of bread, Hamlet had never been written.... I think I’ll say as much in my next story.” His was an easy and humorous tongue, facile and creative, too--it being his business to juggle nimbly with ideas and amuse an audience at so much a column.