I often wondered how all the years had slipped by without somehow leaving them stranded, for neither of them had ever “done” anything, even in the most prosaic interpretation of the term. Mr. Parke had studied law, but he had never practiced it. He read widely, memoirs, poetry, history, essays and an occasional novel, and he remembered much of what he read, but his reading was of the desultory kind. He could quote from all literatures but he had no literary hobbies. Mrs. Parke did not even read. Instead she knitted soft, useless things on thick, wooden needles, and when she was in the country armed herself with a flat straw hat, chamois gloves, a pair of scissors, and then proceeded to drive the Scotch gardener to drink. They had never cared much for society. It was enough to know that its doors were open to them, although at one period Mr. Parke must have gone to a great many small dinners at clubs to meet celebrities, for his fund of intimate and delightful anecdote was inexhaustible. But the years had slipped by and they had not been stranded. They imagined, indeed, that they always had been and still were two of the busiest and most important persons in town. They were sixty and fifty-seven when I first met them, and old for their ages. One scarcely expected them to be very actively occupied with the contemporaneous, but after I had seen them often enough to become acclimated (no other word will quite do) I realized that they never had been, that they were then exactly as they always had been, only more so. Their entire lives had been spent in the deification of the unessential, in the reduction of puttering to a science. They had puttered their lives away and were still puttering, only, as they grew older, with a greater intensity, and from the first their lives had been extremely happy. I had never known two human beings who had so successfully mastered the art of transforming molehills into mountains. It was their sole occupation. “My dear fellow, I _am_ so glad to see you,” Mr. Parke would exclaim as he bustled into the room when I went there to luncheon, and he meant it, for they were both kind and hospitable. “I’m afraid I’m a minute or two late, but this morning I’ve been driven, positively driven, from the moment I got out of my bath--and by matters I simply can’t trust to anyone else. They leave me no time for anything; I mean the things I like to do and want to do. But you remember that line from Browning’s Paracelsus, don’t you? ‘Let each task present its petty good to thee.’ I always try to think of that.”