"It was some great moral problem, I think you said," Fenton responded, trying to recall accurately what she had told him earlier in the sitting of a talk she had had with a friend on her way to the studio. "The object of life, or something of that sort. Well, the object of life is to endure life, I suppose, just as the object of time is to kill time." "We had got so far in our talk as to decide," Miss Wainwright went on, too much absorbed in recalling the interview she was relating to notice the painter's words, "he decided, that is, not I--that the only thing to do is to enjoy the present and to let the future go; but I object that one cannot help dreading what might come." She spoke, of course, solely with reference to her own inner experiences, but Fenton, with the egotism which is universal to humanity, received the words in their application to his own case. If he could but determine what would come, he might decide how to act in this hard present. Yet, whatever that future might be, he must at any cost extricate himself from this coil which pressed so cruelly upon him. "Even so he would be right," he answered her words. "Happiness in this world consists, at best, in a choice of evils, and at least one may make of the present a sauce _piquante_ to cover the flavor of the dread of the future." "You take a more desperate view of the matter than my friend," Miss Wainwright said, sighing bitterly. "His only fear is that I shall lose everything by not making sure of whatever present happiness is possible." Fenton glanced at her curiously, aware no less from her tone and manner than from her words that the conversation was touching her as well as himself through some keen personal experience. A feeling of sharp and irritating remorse stung him from the thought that he, whose whole sensuous nature strove for selfish joyousness in life, was discussing this question from his own standpoint, while the pale, lovely girl before him was regarding the whole problem from the high plane of duty. Instinctively he set himself to justify his position against hers; to demonstrate that his Pagan, selfish philosophy was the true guide.