"You mean to be generous, I can see--but I don't think it likely that I shall ever make up my mind to take a regular job. I'm not built for it." "You're not thinking about getting married, then, I reckon?" A dark flush rose to Oliver's forehead, and turning away, he stared with unseeing eyes out of the window. "No. I haven't any intention of that," he responded. A certain craftiness appeared in Cyrus's face. "Well, well, you're young yet, and you may be in want of a wife before you're many years older." "I'm not the kind to marry. I'm too fond of my freedom." "Most of us have felt like that at one time or another, but when the thought of a woman takes you by the throat, you'll begin to see things differently. And if you ever do, a good steady job at twelve hundred a year will be what you'll look out for." "I suppose a man could marry on that down here," said Oliver, half unconscious that he was speaking aloud. "I married on less, and I've known plenty of others that have done so. A good saving wife puts more into a man's pocket than she takes out of it." As he paused, Oliver's attention, which had wandered off into a vague mist of feeling, became suddenly riveted to the appalling spectacle of his uncle's marriage. He saw the house in Bolingbroke Street, with the worn drab oilcoth in the hall, and he smelt the smell of stale cooking which floated through the green lattice door at the back. All the sweetness of life, all the beauty, all the decency even, seemed strangled in that smell as if in some malarial air. And in the midst of it, the unkempt, slack figure of Belinda, with her bitter eyes and her sagging skirt, passed perpetually under the flickering gas-jet up and down the dimly lighted staircase. This was how one marriage had ended--one marriage among many which had started out with passion and courage and the belief in happiness. Knowing but little of the April brevity of his uncle's mating impulse, he had mentally embroidered the bare instinct with some of the idealism in which his own emotion was clothed. His imagination pictured Cyrus and Belinda starting as light-hearted adventurers to sail the chartless seas of romance. What remained of their gallant ship to-day except a stark and battered hulk wrecked on the pitiless rocks of the actuality? A month ago that marriage had seemed merely ridiculous to him. Standing now beside the little window, where the wan face of evening, languid and fainting sweet, looked in from the purple twilight, he was visited by one of those rare flashes of insight which come to men of artistic sensibility after long periods of spiritual warfare. Pity stabbed him as sharply as ridicule had done a moment before, and with the first sense of human kinship he had ever felt to Cyrus, he understood suddenly the tragedy that underlies all comic things. Could there be a deeper pathos, after all, than simply being funny? This absurd old man, with his lean,