like that made "all the difference"...He was a little tired
of experimenting on life; he wanted to "take a line", to
follow things up, to centralize and concentrate, and produce
results. Two or three more years of diplomacy--with her
beside him!--and then their real life would begin: study,
travel and book-making for him, and for her--well, the joy,
at any rate, of getting out of an atmosphere of bric-a-brac
and card-leaving into the open air of competing activities.

The desire for change had for some time been latent in him,
and his meeting with Mrs. Leath the previous spring had
given it a definite direction. With such a comrade to focus
and stimulate his energies he felt modestly but agreeably
sure of "doing something". And under this assurance was the
lurking sense that he was somehow worthy of his opportunity.
His life, on the whole, had been a creditable affair. Out
of modest chances and middling talents he had built himself
a fairly marked personality, known some exceptional people,
done a number of interesting and a few rather difficult
things, and found himself, at thirty-seven, possessed of an
intellectual ambition sufficient to occupy the passage to a
robust and energetic old age. As for the private and
personal side of his life, it had come up to the current
standards, and if it had dropped, now and then, below a more
ideal measure, even these declines had been brief,
parenthetic, incidental. In the recognized essentials he
had always remained strictly within the limit of his
scruples.

From this reassuring survey of his case he came back to the