"She's got it figured out that all you've spent on making Ellen comfortable for life isn't a patch on what she and the boys cost me, so it's high time you set about your natural destiny of making some woman happy." "Look here, Julian, _is_ it an object for a man to live for, making some woman happy?" "Well, it keeps you on the jump all right," Lessing assured him. "What else is there? It's a way of making yourself happy when you come to look at it; keeping her and the kids so that you leave the world better off than you found it. It suits _me_." He was looking, indeed, particularly well suited, in spite of a disposition to portliness and a suspicion of thinning hair, with what the seventeen years just past had brought him. A warm appreciation of what those things were touched his regard for his companion with a sober affectionateness. "I reckon Clarice is right: a wife and a couple of kids is the prescription for your case. That's why she wanted me to remind you that you could afford 'em." "And has she named the day?" Peter wished to know whimsically. "Oh, I say, Weatheral----" "My dear Julian, if I hadn't been able to see what Clarice has been up to for the last six months, at least I could have depended on Ellen to see it for me." "She doesn't object, does she?" "Oh, if you think the privilege of being aunt to your children has made up to her for not being aunt to mine----" "The privilege is on the other side. But anyway, I'm glad you got on to it. I didn't want to be a spoil sport. I suppose women's instincts can be trusted in these things, but I hated to see Clarice coming it over you blind." Peter wondered to himself a little, which of the charming ladies to whom he had been introduced lately, Clarice had selected for him. He wasn't, however, concerned about her coming it blind over anybody but the senior partner who got down now from the desk, whistling softly and walking with a wide step as a man will in June when affairs go well with him, and he feels that if there are still some things which he desires he is able to get them for himself. "Don't forget you're coming to us on Saturday; and we dine together to-night as usual." "As usual." Always on the anniversary of their beginning business together Weatheral and Lessing, who were still, in spite of seeing one another daily for seventeen years, able to be interested in one another, dined apart from their families, savouring pleasantly that essential essence of maleness, the mutual power of work well accomplished. It was the best tribute that Clarice and Ellen could pay to the occasion that they understood that, much as their several lives had profited by the partnership, they were still and naturally outside of it.