"How silly!" she said.

"Yes, he was very silly," agreed Helmsley, watching her narrowly from
under his half-closed eyelids. "But most thinkers are silly, even when
they don't take opium. They believe in Love."

She coloured. She caught the sarcastic inflection in his tone. But she
was silent.

"Most men who have lived and worked and suffered," he went on, "come to
know before they die that without a great and true love in their lives,
their work is wasted, and their sufferings are in vain. But there are
exceptions, of course. Some get on very well without love at all, and
perhaps these are the most fortunate."

"I am sure they are!" she said decisively.

He picked up two or three of the rose-petals her restless fingers had
scattered, and laying them in his palm looked at the curved, pink,
shell-like shapes abstractedly.

"Well, they are saved a good deal of trouble," he answered quietly.
"They spare themselves many a healing heart-ache and many purifying
tears. But when they grow old, and when they find that, after all, the
happiest folks in the world are still those who love, or who have loved
and have been loved, even though the loved ones are perhaps no longer
here, they may--I do not say they will--possibly regret that they never
experienced that marvellous sense of absorption into another's life of
which Mrs. Browning writes in her letters to her husband. Do you know