"Do you know why I have backed you so persistently?" "You have been awfully kind!" "It was not altogether on your father's account," the doctor interrupted him. "I might have put you in some business and left you to fight your own way. That kind of experience we all know makes men, the successful men, who are tried and found capable of bearing strains. I have saved you so far from that struggle. Why? "Because," continued the doctor authoritatively, "there are some men who care more to do some one thing, who love one object, more than they care for success, for fame, for pleasure. If they are defeated, if they never have the chance to do that one thing--perhaps the world is no poorer--there are plenty to take their places, but they are capable of misery, real misery, such as no common failure ever brings to the common man. They may be foolish; they may be idle and be drawn aside and think they are happier in doing what comes along, but that is never true. They are wretched. Such men can never love, except as an interlude. Do you understand me?" The doctor paused at this sharp interrogation; Long's eyes had followed him wonderingly during his long monologue. "So you thought----" he stammered. "That you were made in that way," nodded the doctor; "an undomesticated animal." Long sat brooding over this idea. The doctor went on in his low, swift tones. "You have the hunger and the thirst for that work over there. You would play with a woman and then put her out of your heart into the street, or try to tame yourself. Which would be worse." "And if I am not so sure that I am built like that? Suppose I am willing to make the sacrifice, if you call it that?" The doctor's tone became neutral again. "You refer to a possible interest in my daughter." Long's face slowly flushed under the word "possible." "Yes! at least, perhaps--I have never put it to myself exactly--indeed why do you ask?" "May I ask how far that interest has gone?" The younger man half rose from his chair. "If it had _gone_ at all," he said, hotly, "you would have known it." "Yes," the doctor knitted his eyebrows, "that's all right. Don't feel disturbed. If I didn't consider you to be a gentleman in a more intensive sense of the word than is usual, I shouldn't be talking to you like this. Have a cigar." There was another long pause. The doctor debated quickly with himself what course to take. When he resumed, he used his rough weapon.