"To gaze on life," he went on after a pause, "and not to live it, spares one many sorrows. Even love, which comes to most men as an overwhelming passion, stole into my life like a perfume of Cashmere. When I was twelve years of age and living on the south coast, I used to pass a little dream-girl of seven years or so. The purity of her face stayed with me like a melody a mother sings to her child. Then she was ill, and for three weeks I never saw her. Finally she came one day in a chair, and her beauty was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen. It made me think that the God who gave us this beautiful world sometimes cherishes a soul as sweet as hers and keeps it in a body that is frail, so that through life He can watch it like a flower, tenderly, lovingly;... and when He wants it back again He has but to whisper, and, like a violet bending to a summer breeze, it hears and obeys.... I have sometimes thought that even tears shed for such a one have in them the quality of dew, and serve to keep the memory green and pleasant. "The next day I brought her a rose. Though we had never spoken, she took it, and gave me her face to kiss.... I lost my mother when I was very young, but this dream-girl's kiss supplied that inspiration for the ideal that a child takes from its mother. I could not have been impure after that--I could not have been unkind. The next day she was gone, and I never saw her again until I went to Surrey to visit young Oxley. She was his sister." "And you found?" "That the dream-child had become a woman--the charm of Spring had softened to the witchery of Summer." He shrugged his shoulders and relit his cigarette, which had gone out. "That, my dear Pest, is how love came to me." I frowned in an endeavor to pierce his apparently superficial dismissal of the subject. "Don't you intend to marry her?" I said. "Marry her?" He laughed, but there was little mirth in the sound. "Does a jester marry?" His eyes hardened, and there was a new ring to his voice. "Who am I to take a wife? A _poseur_, a _flâneur_, in a world of men, I stand discredited beside the poorest workman whose toil brings in a pittance for his wife and kiddies. England is calling for men--for men, I say." He brought his fist with a crash on the table. "What can I offer her--my parlor accomplishments? My minstrel's mummery that shudders at the sight of a sword? Can I blow bubbles in a world where hearts are breaking?" There were tears in his voice, but his eyes were flashing furiously. "Hexcuse me." A man had stepped up to us, wearing the armlet of a recruit. His face was oddly familiar, but I could not recall it until a light was switched on just behind him, and I recognized the pumpkin-faced man of Christmas Eve. "I just thought of 'ow I'd like for to tell you as I've been took for the Army O.K." We shook his hand and wished him the best of luck.