"I hoped that I had made it clear to you that, in regard to my Vocation, I am 'marking time,' until I shall have earned enough to pay my debts incurred on the strength of my faith in the honour of a parcel of archiepiscopal and episcopal and clerical sharpers, and also a sum sufficient to produce me a small and certain annuity----" "You keep harping upon that string," the cardinal complained. "It is the only string which you have left unbroken on my lute." "I see you are a very sensitive subject, Mr. Rose. I think that long brooding over your wrongs has fixed in you some such pagan and erroneous idea as that which Juvenal expresses in the verse where he says that poverty makes a man ridiculous." "Nothing of the kind," George retorted with all his claws out. "On the contrary, it is I--the creature of you, my Lord Cardinal, and your Catholics--who make Holy Poverty look ridiculous!" "A clever paradox!" The cardinal let a tinge of his normal sneer affect his voice. "Not even a paradox. A poor thing: but mine own," George flung in, glaring through his great-great-grandfather's silver spectacles which he used indoors. "Well, well: the money-question need not trouble you," said the cardinal, turning again to the window. Indifference was his pose. "But it does trouble me. It vitally troubles me. And your amazing summons troubles me as well--now. Why do you come to me after all these years?" "Precisely, Mr. Rose, after all these years, as you say. It has been suggested to me, and I am bound to say that I agree with the suggestion, that we ought to take your singular persistency during all these years--how many years?" "Say twenty." "That we must take your singular persistency during twenty years as a proof of the genuineness of your Vocation." George turned his face to the little yellow cat, who had climbed to and was nestling on his shoulder. "And therefore," the cardinal continued, "I am here to-day to summon you to accept Holy Order with no delay beyond the canonical intervals." "I will respond to that summons within two years." "Within two years? Life is uncertain, Mr. Rose. We who are here to-day may be in our graves by then." I myself am an old man. "I know. Your Eminency is an old man. I, by the grace of God, the virtue of my ancestors, and my own attention to my physique, am still a young man; and younger by far than my years. I have not been preserved in the vigour and freshness of youth by miracle after miracle during twenty years for nothing. And, when I shall have published three more books, I will respond to your summons. Not till then." "I told you that the money-question need not hinder you." "Yes, Eminency; and my late diocesan said the same thing several years ago." "You are suspicious, Mr. Rose." "I have reason to be suspicacious, Eminency." The cardinal threw up his hands. The gesture wedded irritation to despair. "You doubt me?" he all but gasped. "I trusted Your Eminency in 1894; and----"