“I have been practically alone ever since I can remember,” said Muriel suddenly, “but I have seldom been lonely. In fact I often think it is only the people who don’t live alone who _are_ lonely. They are always trying to be understood, to break through barriers and live on a common level, and there’s no such chance, for the more one shares the little things the more pitilessly isolated the big things make us. It is so dreadfully inadequate that tantalizing partial help one gets from others.” “There I think you are wrong,” he said looking quietly across at her. “It’s the whole loaf theory you’re defending. You might just as well say a man had better have no legs than one, or could be as active without a crutch as with one, simply because he can’t be very active anyway. We all want what help we can get, and it is not the least necessary for people to understand us to help us. Children are the greatest help. People who know that we want the moon may be wise enough to tell us it is only a worn-out world of rocks, but people who can’t fathom our desires can still help us by telling us it is beautiful. It is one of the first lessons doctors learn to help patients to help themselves. In fact it is the greatest good we or anybody else can do.” “Yet you don’t say that the most ignorant doctors are the best?” she prevaricated. “No! because sympathy of that kind without knowledge is sympathy without a backbone. Physical cases require the definite as a foundation, but when one deals with the invisible, love comes first, not knowledge. Ignorant mothers mean more to their children than thoughtful scholars could—even if they do slap them occasionally. A man or woman without a home, if they have no jars and frets, must miss the influence of it, and feel the horrible loneliness of life.” He so intensely meant what he said that Muriel felt she had been flippant, and yet his seriousness made her long to be more so. “Birds who sit on telegraph wires, and can fly away from the line of communication whenever they want to, are more to my liking,” she said. “You forget that the birds have nests,” suggested the doctor smiling. “And you that we don’t have wings,” sighed Muriel. “And we can’t change our mates every spring; when we choose we choose for life, expecting the better—and getting the worst!” “Not always,” said Geoff quietly. Muriel felt angry; she could not tell why. She had never talked in this strain before; she felt vicious with the universe, and its representative opposite her made her worse; besides she had just been to see Gladys.