‘I have tried,’ he admitted, a little ashamed of his backwardness, ‘but I never can make out what they’re driving at—half the time. What they described has never happened to me, or come into my world. I don’t recognise it all as true, I mean—’ He stopped abruptly for fear he might say something to wound her. ‘One can always learn, though, and widen one’s world, can’t one? After all, we _are_ all in the same world, aren’t we?’ He realised the impossibility of correcting her; the invitation to be sententious could not catch him; his nature was too profound to contain the prig. ‘Are we?’ he said gently. ‘Oh, I think so—more or less, Paul. There’s only one _nice_ world, at least.’ She arranged her hat and parasol to keep the sun off, for she was afraid of the sun, even the shy sun of England. He pulled out the deck-chair for her, and opened it. ‘Here,’ she said pointing, ‘if you don’t mind, dear; or perhaps over _there_ where it looks drier; or just _there_ under that tree, perhaps, is better still. It’s more sheltered, and there’s less sun, isn’t there?’ ‘I think there is, yes,’ he replied, obeying her. The phrase ‘there’s less sun’ seemed to him so neatly descriptive of the mental state of persons without imagination. ‘She’ll come here for her summer holidays soon,’ his sister resumed, going back to Joan. ‘She works very hard at that “Home” place in town, and Dick always liked her to use us here as if the place were her own. I promised that.’ She dropped gracefully into the wicker chair, and Paul sat down for a moment beside her on the grass. ‘He spent a lot of capital, you know, in the thing and made her superintendent or something. She has a sort of passion for this rescuing of slum children, and, I believe, works herself to death over it, though she has means of her own. So you will be nice to her when she comes, won’t you, and look after her a bit? I do what I can, but I always feel I’m rather a failure. I never know what to talk to her about. She’s so dreadfully in earnest about everything.’ Paul promised. Joan sounded rather attractive, to tell the truth. He remembered something, too, of the big organisation his old friend had founded in London for the rescue and education of waif-boys. A thrill of pride ran through him, and close at its heels a secret sense of shame, that he himself did nothing in the great world of action—that his own life was a mass of selfish dreaming and refined self-seeking, that all his yearning for God and beauty was after all, perhaps, but a spiritual egoism. It was not the first time this thought had come to trouble and perplex. Of late—especially since he had begun to find these safety-valves of self-expression, and so a measure of relief—his mind had turned in the direction of some bigger field to work in outside self, perhaps more than he quite knew or realised.