"I wonder if it's a matter of size," she said after a moment. "I wonder! Let's be confidential. When I was a little girl we were not at all well-to-do, and my hands were very busy. My father's success came to him only two or three years before his death, when his reputation began to grow and his plans for great public buildings began to be accepted, so I was my mother's helper. We had but one servant, and I learned to make beds, to dust, to wipe dishes, to make tea and coffee, and to cook simple dishes. If Admiral de Tracy's sister had to work, Admiral de Tracy's niece was certainly going to help! Later on came my father's illness and death. We had plenty of servants then, but my hands had learned to be busy. I gave him his medicines, I changed his pillows, I opened his letters and answered such of them as were within my powers, I fanned him, I stroked his aching head. The end came, and mother and I had hardly begun to take hold of life again when her health failed. I wasn't enough for her; she needed father and her face was bent towards him. My hands were busy again for months, and they held my mother's when she died. Time went on. Then I began again to make a home out of a house; to use my strength and time as a good wife should, for the comfort of her husband; but oh! so faultily, for I was all too young and inexperienced. It was only for a few months, then death came into my life for the third time, and I was less than twenty. For the first time since I can remember, my hands are idle, but it will not be for long. I want them to be busy always. I want them to be full! I want them to be tired! I want them ready to do the tasks my head and heart suggest." Lavendar had a strong desire to take those same hands in his and kiss them, but instead he rose and spread out his own long brown fingers on the edge of the wall, a man's hands, fine and supple, but meant to work. "I seem to have done nothing," he exclaimed. "You look so young, so irresponsible, so like a bird on a bough, that I cannot associate dull care with you, yet you have lived more deeply than I. Life seems to have touched me on the shoulder and passed me by; these hands of mine have never done a real day's work, Mrs. Loring, for they've been the servants of an unwilling brain. I hated my own work as a younger man, and, though I hope I did not shirk it, I certainly did nothing that I could avoid." He paused, and went on slowly, "I've thought sometimes, of late I mean, that if life is to be worth much, if it is to be real life, and not mere existence, one must put one's whole heart into it, and that two people--" He stopped; he was silent with embarrassment, conscious of having said too much. "Can help each other. Indeed they can," Mrs. Loring went on serenely, "if they have the same ideals. Hardly anyone, fortunately, is so alone as I, and so I have to help myself! Your sisters, now; don't they help?"