Oleron tried to put her off with a recital of inconveniences, but she wouldn't have it. Perhaps in her heart she partly suspected the reason. He was simply mortally weary of the narrow circumstances of his life. He had had twenty years of it--twenty years of garrets and roof-chambers and dingy flats and shabby lodgings, and he was tired of dinginess and shabbiness. The reward was as far off as ever--or if it was not, he no longer cared as once he would have cared to put out his hand and take it. It is all very well to tell a man who is at the point of exhaustion that only another effort is required of him; if he cannot make it he is as far off as ever.... "Anyway," Oleron summed up, "I'm happier here than I've been for a long time. That's some sort of a justification." "And doing no work," said Miss Bengough pointedly. At that a trifling petulance that had been gathering in Oleron came to a head. "And why should I do nothing but work?" he demanded. "How much happier am I for it? I don't say I don't love my work--when it's done; but I hate doing it. Sometimes it's an intolerable burden that I simply long to be rid of. Once in many weeks it has a moment, one moment, of glow and thrill for me; I remember the days when it was all glow and thrill; and now I'm forty-four, and it's becoming drudgery. Nobody wants it; I'm ceasing to want it myself; and if any ordinary sensible man were to ask me whether I didn't think I was a fool to go on, I think I should agree that I was." Miss Bengough's comely pink face was serious. "But you knew all that, many, many years ago, Paul--and still you chose it," she said in a low voice. "Well, and how should I have known?" he demanded. "I didn't know. I was told so. My heart, if you like, told me so, and I thought I knew. Youth always thinks it knows; then one day it discovers that it is nearly fifty--" "Forty-four, Paul--" "--forty-four, then--and it finds that the glamour isn't in front, but behind. Yes, I knew and chose, if _that's_ knowing and choosing ... but it's a costly choice we're called on to make when we're young!" Miss Bengough's eyes were on the floor. Without moving them she said, "You're not regretting it, Paul?" "Am I not?" he took her up. "Upon my word, I've lately thought I am! What _do_ I get in return for it all?" "You know what you get," she replied. He might have known from her tone what else he could have had for the holding up of a finger--herself. She knew, but could not tell him, that he could have done no better thing for himself. Had he, any time these ten years, asked her to marry him, she would have replied quietly, "Very well; when?" He had never thought of it.... "Yours is the real work," she continued quietly. "Without you we jackals couldn't exist. You and a few like you hold everything upon your shoulders."