never see that door again. Perhaps I was suffering a little from
overwork--perhaps it was what I've heard spoken of as the feeling
of forty. I don't know. But certainly the keen brightness that
makes effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just
at a time with all these new political developments--when I ought to
be working. Odd, isn't it? But I do begin to find life toilsome,
its rewards, as I come near them, cheap. I began a little while ago
to want the garden quite badly. Yes--and I've seen it three times."

"The garden?"

"No--the door! And I haven't gone in!"

He leaned over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his
voice as he spoke. "Thrice I have had my chance--_thrice!_ If ever
that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in out of
this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these
toilsome futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will
stay . . . . . I swore it and when the time came--_I didn't go_.

"Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to
enter. Three times in the last year.

"The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the
Tenants' Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a
majority of three. You remember? No one on our side--perhaps very
few on the opposite side--expected the end that night. Then the
debate collapsed like eggshells. I and Hotchkiss were dining with
his cousin at Brentford, we were both unpaired, and we were called
up by telephone, and set off at once in his cousin's motor. We got