"Oh, nothing much, but I sort of grew up with the idea of Duty--something you had to do because there was nobody else to do it. You had not only to do it but you had to like it, not because it was likable, but because it was your duty. It was always right in front of me: I couldn't see over or around it; I just had to do it." "Well, you did it," Lessing corroborated. "Clarice says the way you've taken care of Ellen----" "And the way Ellen has taken care of me--but then Ellen was all the woman I had." He caught himself up swiftly after that; it was seldom even to his partner that anything escaped him in reference to the interior life of dreams which had gone on in him, quite happily behind his undistinguished exterior. "But somehow it hasn't seemed to come out anywhere. I've done my duty ... and when I'm dead and Ellen's dead, where is it? After all, what have I done?" "Ah, look at Pleasanton," Julian reminded him; "do you call that nothing?" They looked together toward the esplanade along the river, beginning at this hour to be flecked with the white aprons of nurse-maids and their charges. "We've given them clean water to drink and clean streets, and a safe place for the children to play in. The fight we had with the city council for _that_...!" He waved his arm again toward the well-parked river front. "Ever since I sold your farm for you and you began putting your money into the business, we've walked right along with it. Even before you left Siegel Brothers and we used to sit up nights with the map, planning where to put our money like a checker-board, we saw things like this for the town, and now we've made 'em true. And you say we've done nothing!" The senior partner was touched a little in his tenderest susceptibilities. "Oh, well," Peter admitted with a shamed laugh, "I suppose man is an incurable egotist. I was thinking of something more personal, something _mine_, the way a book or a picture belongs to the man who makes it." "The game isn't over yet," Lessing reminded him, with a glance at the unfolding bud which Clarice had sent as a symbol of the opening year; "you're only forty. And, anyway, the money's yours; you made it." Something in the word recalled him to a thought that had been earlier in his mind. "Clarice wanted me to ask you to-day if you had any idea how much you are worth." Peter's attention came back from the window with a start. "Does that mean the Fresh Air Fund or the Association for the Protection of Ownerless Pups?" Julian grinned. "Ownerless bachelors rather. Clarice has an idea you are well enough off to marry." "If it were a proposition of my being married to Clarice I should consider myself well enough off without anything else----" Peter dropped the light, accustomed banter for a sober tone. "How well off does your wife think I ought to be?"