“Take a chair, Quong Ho, and let us talk. Elliptic Functions are too inhuman for me to-night.” Quong Ho put his burden down on the table and brought up a straight-backed, rush-bottomed chair, and sat down stiffly, facing his master, who took up his parable. “I’ve been thinking of what you said at dinner. You touched on a spiritual aspect of the hypothetical emotion we were discussing which did not occur to me. What made you do it?” “Sir,” replied Quong Ho, “if you will permit me to speak my thoughts, I cannot separate life into two watertight departments——” “_Com_partments,” murmured Baltazar, through force of habit. Quong Ho bowed. “I recollect. To resume. I cannot separate life into two watertight compartments—the material and the spiritual. It appears to me to be the subtle interfusion, the solemnization of holy matrimony, between the two.” “One of the charms, my son, of your conversation,” laughed Baltazar, “is its unexpected allusiveness.” Quong Ho rose and made a deep bow. “You have called me, sir, by a term which overwhelms me with filial gratitude.” Baltazar, who had used the word deliberately, held out his hand. “I believe,” said he in Chinese, “in your profession of a son’s affection, and therefore I admit you to the position. After a year or so our lives will materially be separated, but spiritually they will run the same course.” “This is the happiest and most fortunate day of my life,” said Quong Ho. “Without going into superlatives,” replied Baltazar in English, “I may reciprocate the sentiment.” They talked on, developing the idea of wedding of the material and the spiritual, branching off into fascinating side-tracks, as men of alert intelligence delight to do in conversation, and coming back now and then with the flash of unexpectedness to the main issue. They touched on the hermits of Thebaïd. “Their outlook,” said Baltazar, “was exclusively spiritual, fundamentally selfish. They were out to save their own silly, unimportant souls from hell-fire, and nothing else mattered. Egotism raised to infinity. Our retirement has nothing at all in common with theirs.” “Sir,” said Quong Ho, “since we are speaking very seriously, may I, without indiscretion, ask you whether you too are not out to save your soul?” Baltazar rose from his chair and strode up and down the long room, casting at Quong Ho a swift glance from beneath frowning brows every time he passed him. At last he halted and said: “That’s so. The history of my inner life has been an attempt to save my soul. But there’s a hell of a lot of difference between me and St. Simeon Stylites. That was a kind of ass who sat for years on the top of a pillar and never did a hand’s turn for anybody. All he thought of was his escape from hell. Now I, as far as my soul is concerned, don’t care a damn whether it’s going to hell or heaven. My object in saving it is to be of use to my fellow-creatures.” Quong Ho, who had risen when his master rose, said: