“I had forgotten,” Gerald said, “the boy. Yes, I remember hearing that you had thoughtfully provided me with offspring during my absence. I know not quite how to thank you, my dear fellow, for a favor so delicate and so personal. We will therefore cough and drop the subject.” Then Gerald leaned back in the chair. He put together his finger-tips, and smilingly he looked at them with rather tired, old eyes. “So I stay faithful to one woman, after all! I have been kept in everything a model American citizen. I have gracefully adhered to the code of a gentleman. In my private life I have evinced every proper respect for the chivalrous sacrament of adultery between social equals. In the field of my professional labors I have composed no puerile and lascivious romances, but only serious and instructive works. I am, in brief, in all respects, a credit to my native Lichfield, and, more generally, to the United States of America.” He shrugged. He spread out those old-looking, futile hands. “Well, certainly I must not spoil the miracle. So I submit. I yield to the demands of propriety. I accept my personal good behavior; I accept my success; and I accept also my measure of actual famousness.” Then Gerald said: “Therefore I must, so long as my life lasts, continue faithfully your work as the recorder of historical and scientific truths, since it was such truths which brought my name into famousness. Oh, yes, you may depend upon it, I shall henceforward honor these fine truths within the limits advisable for anybody now nearing sixty. I shall serve them, that is, with my pen rather than with other instruments now perhaps more fallible. For the trained intelligence of such a famous scholar as I have become cannot deny their proper importance to those scientific and historical truths which brought him into famousness,—nor would, of course, my admirers care to have me abandoning my métier.”