The present chronicle is an attempt to give an answer, inevitably a very tentative one, to this formidable question; the writer, feeling that, as in all these matters, where the elusiveness of human nature plays so prominent a part, there is more hope of approaching the truth, indirectly, and by means of the imaginative mirror of art, than directly, and by means of rational theorizing. The whole question is indeed so intimately associated with the actual panorama of life and the evasive caprices of flesh and blood, that every kind of drastic and clinching formula breaks down under its pressure. Art, alone,--that mysterious daughter of Life,--has the secret of following the incalculable movements of the Force to which she is so near akin. A story which grossly points its moral with fixed indicative finger is a story which, in the very strain of that premature articulation, has lost the magic of its probability. The secret of our days flies from our attempts at making it fit such clumsy categories, and the maddening flavour of the cosmic cup refuses to be imprisoned in any laboratory. At this particular moment in the history of our planet it is above all important to protest against this prostituting of art to pseudo-science. It must not be allowed to these hasty philosophical conclusions and spasmodic ethical systems, to block up and close in, as they are so ready to do, the large free horizons of humour and poetry. The magic of the World, mocking both our gravity and our flippancy, withdraws itself from our shrewd rationalizations, only to take refuge all the deeper in our intrinsic and evasive hearts. In this story the author has been led to interest himself in the curious labyrinthine subtleties which mark the difference,--a difference to be observed in actual life, quite apart from moral values,--between the type of person who might be regarded as born to rule, and the type of person who might be regarded as born to be ruled over. The grand Nietzschean distinction is, in a sense, rejected here upon its own ground, a ground often inconsequently deserted by those who make it their business to condemn it. Such persons are apt to forget that the whole assumption of this distinction lies in a substitution of _æsthetic_ values, for the values more commonly applied. The pivotal point of the ensuing narrative might be described as an attempt to suggest, granting such an æsthetic test, that the hearts of “ill-constituted” persons,--the hearts of slaves, Pariahs, cowards, outcasts, and other victims of fate,--may be at least as _interesting_, in their bizarre convolutions, as the hearts of the bravest and gayest among us. And _interest_, after all, is the supreme exigency of the æsthetic sense!