"Ah!" said my friend, "I have often asked myself that. But for many years I had not the time to fall in love; if I had been an idle man it would have been different, and now that I am free--well, I regard it as, on the whole, a wise dispensation. I have no domestic virtues; I am a pretty commonplace person, and I think there is no reason why I should perpetuate my own feeble qualities, bind my dull qualities up closer with the life of the world. Besides, I have a theory that the world is made now very much as it was in the Middle Ages. There was but one choice then--a soldier or a monk. Now, I have no combative blood in me; I hate a row; I am a monk to the marrow of my bones, and the monks are the failures from the point of view of race. No monk should breed monks; there are enough of his kind in the hive already." "You a monk?" said I, laughing. "Why, you are nothing of the kind; you are just the sort of man for an adoring wife and a handful of big children. I must have a better answer." "Well, then," said he, rather seriously, "I will give you a better answer. There are some people whose affections are made to run, strong and straight, in a narrow channel. The world holds but one woman for a man of that type, and it is his business to find her; but there are others, and I am one, who dribble away their love in a hundred channels--in art, in nature, among friends. To speak frankly, I have had a hundred such passions. I made friends as a boy, quickly and romantically, with all kinds of people--some old, some young. Then I have loved books, and music, and, above all, the earth and the things of the earth. To the wholesome, normal man these things are but an agreeable background, and the real business of life lies with wife and child and work. But to me the real things have been the beautiful things--sunrise and sunset, streams and woods, old houses, talk, poetry, pictures, ideas. And I always liked my work, too." "And you did it well?" I said. "Oh, yes, well enough," he replied. "I have a clear head, and I am conscientious; and then there was some fun to be got out of it at times. But it was never a part of myself for all that. And the reason why I gave it up was not because I was tired of it, but because I was getting to depend too much upon it. I should very soon have been unable to do without it." "But what is your programme?" I said, rather urgently. "Don't you want to be of some use in the world? To make other people better and happier, for instance."