you'll be able to. It will be a great disgrace if you don't."

"It's very interesting to hear you speak of yourself; but I don't know
what you mean by your allusions to your having fallen off," Paul Overt
observed with pardonable hypocrisy. He liked his companion so much now
that the fact of any decline of talent or of care had ceased for the
moment to be vivid to him.

"Don't say that--don't say that," St. George returned gravely, his head
resting on the top of the sofa-back and his eyes on the ceiling. "You
know perfectly what I mean. I haven't read twenty pages of your book
without seeing that you can't help it."

"You make me very miserable," Paul ecstatically breathed.

"I'm glad of that, for it may serve as a kind of warning. Shocking
enough it must be, especially to a young fresh mind, full of faith--the
spectacle of a man meant for better things sunk at my age in such
dishonour." St. George, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly
but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion. His tone indeed
suggested an impersonal lucidity that was practically cruel--cruel to
himself--and made his young friend lay an argumentative hand on his arm.
But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the
eighteenth-century ceiling: "Look at me well, take my lesson to heart--for
it _is_ a lesson. Let that good come of it at least that you shudder
with your pitiful impression, and that this may help to keep you straight
in the future. Don't become in your old age what I have in mine--the
depressing, the deplorable illustration of the worship of false gods!"

"What do you mean by your old age?" the young man asked.