"There's nothing to tell. It was in an Alaskan mining-camp. The man was drunk and armed. He attacked me, and I had to defend myself. He shot twice before I shot at all, but I hit and he didn't. I'm sorry I had to do it to remain alive, but I'm not sorry to have remained alive." "Oh," she cried, petulantly, "you are _so_ matter-of-fact!" "Not nearly so matter-of-fact as you suppose. Not in the important things. In business, in everyday life, a man has to be matter-of-fact. It's the only method to get what you want." "Do you really think so?" She appealed to him now as to a well of knowledge. Perhaps, he reflected, she had about her ordinarily few wells to which she was permitted so to appeal. "Then maybe that is why I don't get what I want." "Surely you have all you want." She shook her raven hair. "Not any of it." "And you want?" "Lots of things." "For instance?" She smiled, but was firm. "No, I sha'n't tell you." "Not one?" "Not now." "Perhaps they are not always the sort of things that you ought to have." "Yes, they are." "All of them?" Her nod was positive: "All." "But, whether you ought to have them or not, are you equally sure that they would be worth possessing?" "How can I know till I have had them?" "Easily. There are two ways of learning the value of anything we want: one is to get it, the other to lose it." "We're crabbed against the things we miss." "Are we? I don't know. Even if we are, there's a good deal to be said in favour of the comfort that lies in the philosophy of sour grapes." She did not wholly follow him, but she was clear on the chief point. "It doesn't make me feel any more contented," she said, "to believe that I wouldn't have been happy if I had got something that I wanted to get and didn't." Stainton shook his head. "Some time," he said, "that belief will be your greatest comfort." Muriel looked away. She was revolving this problem in her youthful mind, and when she replied it was by the _argumentum ad hominem_, which is an excellent argument and generally _ab femina_. "You have been successful," she began. "If you had not been, would it have made you more contented to believe that success wouldn't have brought you happiness?" "I was thinking," said Stainton, "of something in the past, something that I didn't get, and something that was not a business matter." He spoke slowly. She understood. "I'm sorry," she said, softly. "No, no," he smiled. "In point of fact, whenever I failed in prospecting I did try to think that money would not have made me happy. But you may be right, for I always started prospecting again." "And now?" "Oh, now," said Stainton, with a concluding smile, "I am trying hard to resist the manifold temptations of good fortune."