The energetic, well-dressed man who walked so quickly in spite of his gray hair was quite out of breath from the unusual experience of mounting stairs on foot, when he stepped into the anteroom. There he looked about him with a keenly observant eye. The room had obviously not been intended as the entrance to modern offices. Its dingy, paneled walls and darkened carved ceiling dated at least from the time when the ancestors of the newcomer were hunting Indians in the untracked forests of Massachusetts. It was a forlorn cheerless apology for a convenient, well-equipped business waiting-room. And yet the intelligent, keen eyes now looking at it saw in it ... what? Something he could not analyze, something he tried to express. "What the devil is it about their little old holes...?" he asked himself with the fresh vivid curiosity which was his habit about phenomena new to him.

A one-armed young soldier, in a worn blue uniform, with a patch over one eye, rose up from the cane-bottomed chair, took from the white-pine table a small pad of paper and held it out to the newcomer sketching a bow. The older man looked the other way sedulously. He was a very tender-hearted person (except of course for his business competitors) and the constant sight of the maimed wreckage of young manhood made him sick.

On the pad of paper was printed "Nom du Visiteur," with a blank following it, and, underneath, "Objet du la visite." Mr. Hale's French was limited, but he made out that he was to write down who he was and what his business was, and generously he admired the little detail of office administration which he had never happened to see in an American business office. "That beats sending in a message by the office-boy, all right!" he thought to himself as he wrote. "They are funny people! Just when you get absolute proof that they can't do business any more than a sick cat, you run into something that makes you wonder."

He had written on the pad "Randolph Metcalf Hale, President of the Illinois Association of Druggists," and, underneath that, "On business connected with closer commercial relations of France and the United States." As he handed the slip of paper back to the young soldier he thought, "I might about as well get a rubber stamp for that last, and save writing it over so often."

The uniformed messenger limped out of the room. "Oh Lord! and a wooden leg, along with only one eye and one arm," thought Mr. Hale, wincing at the too familiar sound of the halting gait. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and stood meditatively looking down at his own vigorous, well-clad legs.

The soldier came back and motioned the visitor to follow him. They went along a narrow corridor with occasional steps up and other steps down, with large old windows looking out through time-dimmed panes upon a stone-paved court with an old gray stone fountain. The American shook his head. "Never anything new! Always cutting their clothes out of their grand-father's left-overs and sewing them up by hand; that's it, everything hand-made!"

He was ushered into an office where a man of about his own age, with a black beard, streaked with white, rose up and came towards him with outstretched hand.

"Ninth to-day," noted the American mentally. He amused himself by keeping statistics on the fabulous amount of handshaking accomplished in French business life.

Then he explained his presence. Partly because he accounted it a crime to take longer than necessary to state your business, and partly because he had stated it so many times, he packed a succinct account of himself into comparatively few phrases.

"Like almost everybody else in America, Monsieur Portier, I want to help make up to France for the way she's been having the rough end of all this war. But everybody does best at his own sort of help; and I didn't come over for reconstructing villages or taking care of refugees. That sort of work's got to be done, of course, but there are a lot of our own folks at that already. Anyhow, not knowing your language, or your folks, I'd make a poor job of trying to fix up their personal lives. That's not my specialty. But I have a specialty, and that's the American toilet preparations business. And it occurred to me out there in Evanston that perhaps getting American business along my line joined up closer with French business would be as good a turn as I could do for France. After all, though it does give you the horrors to see the poor boys with their legs and arms shot off, that doesn't last but one generation. But business now ... all the future is there!" His eye kindled. He had evidently pronounced his credo. The attentive Frenchman behind the desk nodded, acquiescing in carefully accurate English: "Precisely, Mr. Hale. You had the very same idea which induced my Government to organize this committee of which I am secretary. I am more than at your disposition."

"I know it," said the American without further expression of gratitude than this recognition, "and that's why I'm here. I've got to a place where I need some help. It's this way. I've done a lot of straight business, I mean paying business. And I've managed that all right. I've got the rails laid for our sending over drug specialties you don't have here and for shipping to the States the toilet preparations specialties I find here. But now I'm here I want to do more than just regular business. Now that I see your country and take in what the war's been, and think what you've been up against ... well, Monsieur Portier, I tell you I want to do something for France!"

He said this with a simple, heartfelt sincerity which moved the Frenchman to lean from his chair and give him a silent handshake of appreciation. The American forgot to add this to his total for the day, going on earnestly with his story: "And so, I keep my eyes open all the time for little good turns I can do. I don't mean charity ... honestly, I think that does about as much harm as good, though of course we have to go through the motions in a time like this. I mean business good turns, such as I'd like to have anybody do me, look at my concern with a fresh eye and tell me how I could make it better, or else tell me where I could find a bigger market. You understand? Like that. Now I've been doing business with a big chemical factory out in the country near Paris. The nearest place to it, for me, is Versailles ... maybe you happen to know Versailles?"

The Frenchman nodded gravely. Yes, he had a married sister living in Versailles. "Well, there's a little drug-store out there, one of these peaceful, sleepy-looking, home-and-mother French drug-stores, with a big cat dozing in the window, and somebody in a white apron putting up pills behind the counter, and so far as anybody from my part of the world can see, not enough business doing from one week's end to another, to buy a postage-stamp."

The Frenchman laughed. "Oh, it's a very good business in France being a pharmacien."

"That's what everybody tells me, and that's what gets me. One of the things that gets me! In our country when there is any business being done you hear the wheels going 'round.' I can't get used to this smooth European way of doing it and not letting on. Well, my main interest in life being the toilet preparations business I hardly ever go by one without stopping in. You never know when you're going to run onto something worthwhile. Well, out there in Versailles, I certainly did. I ran onto a genius. Yes, sir, that's not too much to say; a genius! Any man who can make a cold cream like that ..."

He interrupted himself to ask: "You don't happen to be up on cold cream? No? It's a pity, because you can't appreciate what that man is doing. By George, I never saw anything like it, and I've dealt in cold creams for thirty years! It's got anything in America beaten a mile! The two great faults of cold cream, you see, are being greasy and being crumbly. This isn't either. And it keeps! He showed me some he'd had for four years in a pot, with just a flat earthenware lid laid on top, and you wouldn't believe it, Monsieur Portier, but it hadn't changed an atom, not an atom! And the fineness of it! The least little pinch between your fingers, and it just sinks right into your pores before your eyes! It's like cream, thick, rich cream off a three-days-set pan of milk, and yet it don't run! And the perfume! Monsieur Portier, I give you my word for it, and I know what I'm talking about, the perfume that little old druggist out in his dinky little old shop has got into his cold cream is the only refined cold cream perfume I ever smelled! It makes all the others smell like a third-rate actress. It's got a ... it's got a ..." He hesitated, searching for exactly the right word and brought it out with enthusiasm, "it's got a clean smell, if you get me, like a nice girl after a bath! I've got daughters of my own," he added in whimsical justification of his metaphor.

The Frenchman had been watching him with appreciative eyes. "Mr. Hale, I see that, like so many of your countrymen, you are a real artist in your line, and you have the artist's flavor."

The American was disconcerted by this characterization. "Who? Me? I know a good thing when I see it, that's all, and that's business, that's not art."

The Frenchman smiled with the amused, respectful sympathy which men of his race so often feel for their American contemporaries. "Well, and what did you do when you discovered this miraculous cold cream?"

Mr. Hale laughed, a young, vigorous laugh which made his gray hair seem a paradox. "Well, you've guessed it. I threw a fit, first of all. I was taken off my feet, and I wouldn't be surprised if I acted like a cat over catnip. So I decided I'd better go away and cool off before I did anything rash. I bought a couple of pots and went back to the hotel to sleep on it. That's something I always try to do, Monsieur Portier, before I let myself in for a big proposition; and I meant this to be big, all right. I wanted to see if that cold cream seemed as good after twenty-four hours as it did at first. Well, it did, and then some! So I got the Swede porter at my hotel, who can talk some English, to go back with me. And I started in to ask the old fellow all about it. Right there I struck a difference. After the way I'd gone on, an American, when I went back the next day, would have been wondering what I was trying to take away from him; but my old friend was just as pleased as a mother is when you tell her she's got a pretty baby. In fact he reminded me of that, the way he talked. So glad to tell me all about it. I got the impression before he got through that it was a member of the family. I don't mean, of course, that he told me how he made it. I wouldn't have let him if he'd started to. But he told me everything else. To begin with, he told me that his folks have been pharmacists right there for more than a hundred years! A hundred years in that little shop in that little street in that little town! I tell you, Monsieur Portier, I never can get used to the way your people stay put."

The Frenchman looked grave. "Perhaps too much so, Mr. Hale."

"Anyhow, he said they had the recipe, the first recipe for that cold cream in his great-grandfather's handwriting. He said there'd been some talk always in the family about its having come from his great-grandfather's father, who had sold toilet specialties to Marie Antoinette, the queen, you know. He said he himself didn't take much stock in that story because everybody in France, more or less, claimed to have a great-grandfather who'd had dealings with Marie Antoinette, but I just thought to myself what a good smart advertisement agency could do with that item ... you could see it on every billboard between New York and San Francisco ... 'Marie Antoinette's own cold cream, rediscovered recipe.' If you've been in America, you can imagine."

"Yes," said the Frenchman, "I can imagine."

"He said, of course, they had not stuck absolutely to that recipe just as it stood. His grandfather had made some changes, experimented with it all his life, and his father had changed the proportions, just little shadings, with years in between, to think them over and to be sure they were right. But he himself had changed it the most, because modern chemistry had let him substitute for one ingredient that had never been just right, something else that exactly filled the bill. Do you know, Monsieur Portier, as he stood there telling me how, for a hundred years, three generations of his folks had concentrated on that, I said to myself: 'By George, there's a reason! No wonder it's better than any of our get-there-quick products. They've certainly got us beat.'"

To this handsome tribute the Frenchman replied dubiously: "It is very generous, Mr. Hale, to say such a thing. But since taking over the work on this committee I have had periods of great depression when it has seemed to me that no power on earth, not even American energy from which I hope a great deal, could ever move our trades-people from their century-old habits of business inertia and lack of enterprise."

"Well, I understand that, too," agreed the American sympathetically; "I certainly do, because that's just what I've come to see you about. We went on with our confab, my old friend and I, and he showed me his books to show how the sale of the cold cream had grown since they began on it. It seems they've had quite a lot of their customers for sixty or seventy years. Not Versailles people at all, you know, people from all over, people who had tried it once and never would have another, and I don't blame them. He's got quite a lot of aristocrats on his list. He showed me names on his account book that made it look like a history of France. Well, the sum-total of it came to this. His grandfather sold on an average three hundred pots a year, which was good for those days; in his father's time it went up, so he said, astonishingly, to fifteen hundred pots a year; but he had done even better, and in his little factory-laboratory that he'd had to enlarge, he made four thousand pots a year and sold them all. 'More than ten times what his grandfather had done.'"

In repeating these statistics he reproduced with an ironical exactness the tone of self-congratulation of the pharmacist. The man before him fell into the little trap, remarking innocently: "That is indeed making a remarkable enlargement."

The American sat up straight in his chair so suddenly that he gave the effect of having leaped to his feet. "Remarkable! Why, it was all I could do to keep from sitting right down and crying. Remarkable! Why, with the article he has there, the family ought to have been millionaires a generation ago! Anybody with a particle of business imagination would have put it on the bathroom shelf of every family in Christendom." He went on, more quietly: "I said something of that to the old fellow and I tried, through that hotel porter, to make him understand what my proposition was, to take up his cold cream. To take it up strong. I outlined my plan for the advertising campaign, I told him some of the figures of our toilet preparations market, and I told him I'd guarantee him in less than six months' time to have a demand for fifteen hundred gross pots and by the end of the first year it would pass the four thousand gross mark. I told him just how I could get him credit on the easiest terms for the enlargement of his plant ... one of our Merchants' Associations is prepared to give credit to French and Belgian firms, and I was just starting in to explain how it wouldn't be any risk for him at all, and absolute certain big profits for him and his son ... he's got a son at the front now who's passed his pharmacist's examination and is ready to go on with his father's business...."

He stopped short for a moment, staring into space as though recalling the scene.

"Well," prompted the French listener, "what did he say?"

"He said, as near as I could make out from what the hotel porter told me, he said he didn't want to," replied the American, in the carefully restrained voice of one who recounts an enormity so patent that there is no need for emphasis to bring out its monstrousness. "Yes, from what the hotel porter said, I took it that he said he didn't want to! It wasn't that he was afraid of losing money, or that he suspected a skin deal ... at least that was what he said ... nor that he doubted a single thing I said, it was just that he guessed he didn't feel like it to-day, thank you."

He reached for his hat and stood up. "There, Monsieur Portier, there's where I am. I started to argue, of course. I tried to get at what in hell was the matter anyhow. But I soon saw I was up against something too big for that hotel porter to manage. So I came to see if you would go back with me, or send somebody who's got good sense and business experience, and help me make that proposition all over again. It must be of course that that hotel porter got the thing all balled up, the way he put it. I ought to have known better than to trust it to a Swede, anyhow."

Monsieur Portier looked at the calendar on his desk. "Yes, I shall be glad to go out with you. Let me see, to-day is Monday, next Thursday afternoon."

The visitor's face dropped. "Not till Thursday!" he cried, as though that date were in the next century. "I was hoping you could go right back with me now. I've got a taxi waiting downstairs."

The Frenchman's face wore for an instant a look of consternation which changed into a rather curious, strained expression. Then he said with the accent of heroism, laughing a little, "Yes, Mr. Hale, there is really no valid reason for my not going with you now, at this instant, and I will!" He seemed to regard the resolution as an extraordinary one, adding whimsically, as he put on his overcoat, "Ah, you can never, never understand, my dear Mr. Hale, the awful effort of will it costs a European to do something the moment it is suggested instead of putting it off till the next week."

"No," said the American heartily, "that's something I never will understand."

As they approached the shining windows of the pharmacy, where as a matter of fact a big, beautifully cared-for cat was sleeping in the sun, the Frenchman exclaimed: "Oh, it's Monsieur RÉquine's pharmacy! I've known him for years, ever since my sister came to live in Versailles. I didn't think it could be he because you spoke of him always as old."

"Isn't he?" asked the American.

"Fifty-two. Is that old? I hope not."

"Fifty-two! I'm fifty-four myself! That's one on me!"

"What made you think him old? His hair isn't white. He hasn't any wrinkles. Really, I'm curious to know."

The American stopped on the curbstone, pondering, his alert mind interested by the little problem in self-analysis. "What did make me, I wonder?" He glanced in through the open door and said: "Well, just look at him as he stands there, his hands clasped over his stomach,—you can see for yourself. It's a kind of settled-down-to-stay look that I'm not used to seeing unless a man is so old that he can't move on any more."

The Frenchman looked at the druggist and then at the man beside him. "Yes, I see what you mean," he admitted. He said it with a sigh.

They entered the shop. The druggist came forward with a smile, and shook hands heartily with them both. "Eleven," noted the American mentally.

"Monsieur RÉquine," said the French visitor, "can't we go through into your salon, or perhaps out into your garden for a little talk?" Mr. RÉquine glowed with hospitality. "Yes, yes, delighted. I'll just ask my wife to step here to mind the shop."

"His wife!" asked the American, "to wait on customers?"

A well-dressed, tall, full-bosomed woman of forty-odd, with elaborately dressed black hair and a much powdered, intelligent face came in answer to the call and installed herself back of the counter with her knitting.

"Yes, and she knows as much about the business end as he does, you may be sure," said the Frenchman as they went through a door at the back of the shop, emerging, not, as the American expected, into a storeroom, but into an attractive parlor. They passed through the salon, into an exquisitely kept little dining-room and out into a walled garden which made the American pass his hand over his eyes and look again. While their host was installing them at the little round green iron table under a trellis overgrown by a magnificent grapevine, Mr. Hale's eyes traveled from one point to another of the small paradise before him. It could not have been more than a hundred feet wide and three hundred long, but like a fabled spot in the "Arabian Nights" it shone resplendent with incredible riches. The stone walls, ten feet high, were carpeted to the top with a mantle of glistening green leaves, among which hung peaches and pears, glorious to the view, rank on rank, such fruit as the American had never thought could exist. On each side of the graveled path down the center were flowering plants, like great bouquets each. Back of them were more fruit-trees, none more than eight feet tall, bearing each a dozen or more amazing apples, as brightly colored as the flowers. Around the trees were vegetables, carrots, salads, cabbages, every specimen as floridly full-leafed and perfect as the incredible pictures Mr. Hale had seen, and disbelieved in, on the front of seed catalogues.

From the other end of the garden, drenched in sunshine, came the humming of bees. Above their heads a climbing rose covering the end of the house sent down a clear, delicate perfume from its hundred flowers.

The American's eyes came back from their inspection of all this and rested with a new expression on his rather snuffy, rather stout and undistinguished host. "Will you please tell Monsieur RÉquine from me," he said to his companion, "that I never saw such a garden in my life?"

Monsieur RÉquine waved the tribute away with sincere humility. "Oh, it's nothing compared to those all about me. I can't give it the time I would like to. Later on, when I am retired, and my son has the business ..." his gesture seemed to indicate wider horizons of horticultural excellence before which the American's imagination recoiled breathless.

The straw-colored liqueur had been poured out into the glasses, which were, so Mr. Hale noticed, of extremely fine and delicate workmanship ... "and his wife tending shop!" The two Frenchmen drank with ceremonious bowings and murmured salutations. Mr. Hale consumed his fiery draught silently but with a not ungraceful self-possession. He was at his ease with all kinds of ways of taking a drink.

Then, drawing a long breath, taking off his hat and putting his elbows on the table, he began to expound and the French official with him to translate. The bees hummed a queer, unsuitable accompaniment to his resonant, forceful staccato.

He talked a long time. The patches of sunlight which fell through the vines over their heads had shifted their places perceptibly when he stopped, his head high, his gray eagle's eyes flashing.

The elderly Frenchman opposite him had listened intently, his fat, wrinkled hands crossed on his waistcoat, an expression of thoughtful consideration on his broad face and in his small, very intelligent brown eyes. When the American finished speaking, he bent his head courteously and said: "Mr. Hale, you have spoken with great eloquence. But you have forgotten to touch on one matter, and that is the reason for my doing all that you outline so enthusiastically. Why should I?" It was evidently a genuine and not a rhetorical question, for he paused for a reply, awaiting it with sincere curiosity on his face. He received none, however, the fluent American being totally at a loss. "Why should you?" he said blankly. "I don't believe I understand you." The two exchanged a long puzzled look across the little table, centuries and worlds apart.

"Why, I mean," Monsieur RÉquine went on finally, "I don't see any possible reason for embarking in such a terrifyingly vast enterprise as you outline; no reason for, and many against. To speak of nothing else, I am absolutely, morally certain that my cold cream" (he spoke of it with respect and affection) "would immediately deteriorate if it were manufactured on such an inhuman scale of immensity as you plan, with factories here and factories there, run by mercenary superintendents who had no personal interest in its excellence, with miscellaneous workmen picked up out of the street haphazard. Why, Mr. Hale, you have no idea of the difficulties I have, as it is, to get and train and keep serious, conscientious work-people. I should be lost without the little nucleus of old helpers who have been with our family for two generations and who set the tone of our small factory. They have the reputation and fine quality of our cold cream at heart as much as we of the family. They help us in the selection of the newer, younger workers whom we need to fill the ranks, they help us to train them in the traditions and methods of our work, and with patience teach them, one by one, year by year, the innumerable little fine secrets of manipulation which have been worked out since my grandfather began the manufacture there in that room back of you in 1836. Our recipe is much of course, it is all important; but it is not all. Oh no, Mr. Hale, it is not all. We put into our cold cream beside the recipe, patience, conscience, and pride, and that deftness of hand that only comes after years of training. You cannot buy those qualities on the market, not for any price. To think of my recipe put into the hands of money-making factory superintendents and a rabble horde of riffraff workmen!... Mr. Hale, you must excuse me for saying that I am astonished at your proposing it, you who have shown by your generous appreciation of its qualities that you are so worthy a member of our guild."

He paused, stirred from his usual equable calm and waited for an answer. But he still received none. The American was staring at him across an unfathomable chasm of differences.

Monsieur RÉquine continued: "And as for me personally, I am almost as astonished that you propose it. For nothing in all the world would I enter upon such a life as you depict, owing great sums of money to begin with, for no matter how 'easy' your business credit may be made in the modern world, the fact remains that I should lie down at night and rise up in the morning conscious that thousands of men had intrusted their money to me, that I might easily, by one false step or piece of bad judgment, lose forever money which means life to poor women or old men. Such a fiery trial would shrivel me up. It would be my death, I who have never owed a penny in my life. And then what? Even with the utmost success which you hold out, I should have a life which, compared with what I now have, would be infernal; rushing to and fro over the face of the earth, away from home, my wife, my children, homeless for half the time, constantly employed in the most momentous and important decisions where in order to succeed I must give all of myself, all, all, my brain, my personality, my will power, my soul ... what would be left of me for leisure moments? Nothing! I should be an empty husk, drained of everything that makes me a living and a human being. But of course there would not be any leisure moments.... I see from what you so eloquently say that I would have become the slave and not the master of that invention which has come down to me from my fathers; that instead of its furnishing me and my work-people with a quiet, orderly, contented life, I should only exist to furnish it means for a wild, fantastic growth, like something in a nightmare, because a real growth is never like that, never!

"Mr. Hale, do you know what I do of an evening, in the summer? I leave the shop at half-past five or six, and I step into my garden, where I work till half-past seven, when I am most exquisitely hungry. We dine here under this vine, my wife, my daughters, and my son (he who is now at the front). Afterwards we sit and chat and exchange impressions of the day, as the moon comes up or the stars come out. Perhaps some of the young friends of the children drop in for a game of cards. My wife and I sit down at the other end of the garden on the stone bench where we sat when she came here as a bride, where my father and mother sat when they were bride and groom. The stars come out. I smoke my pipe and watch them. Mr. Hale, it is very surprising, the things which come into your head, if you sit quietly and watch the stars come out. I would not miss thinking them for anything in the world. We talk a little, my wife knits. We meditate a great deal. We hear the gay voices of our children coming to us mingled with the breath of the roses. We have finished another day, and we are very glad to be there, alive, with each other, in our garden. When we come in, my wife makes me a cup of tisane and while I sip that I read, sometimes a little of Montaigne, sometimes a little of Horace, sometimes something modern. And all that while, Mr. Hale, there is in our home, in our hearts, the most precious distillation of peace, the ..."

For some moments the American had been surging inwardly, and he now boiled over with a great wave of words. "Will you just let me tell you what you've been describing to me, Monsieur RÉquine? The life of an old, old man ... and you're younger than I am! And will you let me tell you what I'd call your 'peace'? I'd call it laziness! Why, that's the kind of life that would suit an oyster right down to the ground! And, by George, that's the kind of life that gave the Boches their strangle-hold on French commerce before the war. They weren't afraid of good credit when it was held out to them! They had it too easy, with nobody to stand up against them but able-bodied men willing to sit down in their gardens in the evenings and meditate on the stars, instead of thinking how to enlarge their business! I'll bet they didn't read Horace instead of a good technical magazine that would keep them up to date. Why, Monsieur RÉquine, I give you my word, I have never looked inside my Horace since the day I took the final exam in it! I wouldn't dream of doing it! What would business come to if everybody sagged back like that? You don't seem to realize what business is, modern business. It's not just soulless materialistic money-making, it's the great, big, wide road that leads human beings to progress! It's what lets humanity get a chance to satisfy its wants, and get more wants, and satisfy them, and get more, and conquer the world from pole to pole. It's what gives men, grown men, with big muscles, obstacles of their size to get through. It gives them problems that take all their strength and brain power to solve, that keeps them fit and pink and tiptoe with ambition and zip, and prevents them from lying down and giving up when they see a hard proposition coming their way, such as changing a small factory into a big one and keeping the product up to standard. Business, modern business keeps a man alive so that when he sees a problem like that he doesn't give a groan and go and prune his roses, he just tears right in and does it!"

Monsieur RÉquine listened to the translation of this impassioned credo with the expression of judicial consideration which was evidently the habitual one upon his face. At the end he stroked his beard meditatively and looked into space for a time before answering. When he spoke, it was with a mildness and quiet which made him indeed seem much the older of the two, a certain patient good humor which would have been impossible to the other man. "Mr. Hale, you say that my conception of life looks like laziness to you. Do you know how yours looks to me? Like a circle of frenzied worshipers around a fiery Moloch, into whose maw they cast everything that makes life sweet and livable, leisure, love, affection, appreciation of things rare and fine. My friend, humanity as a whole will never be worth more than the lives of its individuals are worth, and it takes many, many things to make individual lives worth while. It takes a mixture, and it needs, among other elements, some quiet, some peace, some leisure, some occupation with things of pure beauty like my roses, some fellowship with great minds of the past...." His eyes took on a dreamy deepening glow. "Sometimes as I dig the earth among my fruit-trees, the old, old earth, a sentence from Epictetus, or from Montaigne comes into my head, all at once luminous as I never saw it before. I have a vision of things very wide, very free, very fine. Almost, for a moment, Mr. Hale, almost for a moment I feel that I understand life."

The American stood up to go with a gesture of finality. He put his hat firmly on his head and said in pitying valedictory: "Monsieur RÉquine, you're on the wrong track. Take it from me that nobody can understand life. The best thing to do with life is to live it!"

The Frenchman, still seated, still philosophic, made a humorous gesture. "Ah, there are as many different opinions as there are men about what that means, to 'live life'!"

In the cab going back to Paris the American said little. Once he remarked almost to himself, "The thing I can't get over is that his damned cream is better than anything we make."

The French official emerged from a thoughtful silence of his own to comment: "Mr. Hale, the generosity of that remark is only equaled by its perspicacity! It makes me more than ever concerned for the future of French commerce."

That evening Monsieur RÉquine was stooping over a dwarf-apple tree, string in one hand, pruning shears in the other. He was clipping away all except one of the vigorous young shoots. That one he then laid along a wire, strung about a foot from the ground and tied it fast at several points so that in growing it would follow the exact line traced by the horizontal wire. When he finished he gathered up all the clipped shoots, put them under his arm, and stood looking at the severely disciplined little tree, which did not look in the least like a tree any more. The sight apparently suggested an analogy to his mind, for he said in the tone of one who makes an admission: "It's true one does it for apple-trees and vines." After considering this for a moment, he shook his head with decision, "But not for human beings, no."

And yet his brow was far from clear as he betook himself to the stone bench at the end of the garden.

When his wife went out later to join him, she missed the glow of his pipe and inquired, a little troubled, "Why, RenÉ, you've forgotten to light your pipe! what's the matter?"

"AdÈle, do you remember, just before the order for mobilization came, how Robert wanted to travel a year in America to study American business and to see something of other conditions? Perhaps I was wrong not to consent. I've been sitting here thinking it over. Perhaps when he comes back [they always forced themselves to say "when" and never "if"] perhaps we would better let him go, before he settles down to take my place." He took her hand and held it for a moment. "Do you know, AdÈle, after all, the world changes, perhaps more than we realize, here in Versailles."

That evening Mr. Hale sat in his hotel bedroom with all the electric lights blazing, and filled sheet after sheet with elaborate calculations. He was concerned with an important detail of transatlantic transportation to which he did not believe half enough attention had been paid: the question as to what form of carrier is the best for certain breakable objects which he was arranging to send in large quantities into the States. The quantities were so large that if he could effect a small saving of space, with no increase of the breakage per cent., the sum-total would be considerable.

He figured out the relative cubic contents in boxes of a given dimension and in barrels, having always had a leaning towards barrels himself. He looked up technical tables as to the relative weight of sawdust, powdered cork, and excelsior, together with the statistics as to the relative amount of breakage with each sort of packing. His days were so filled with "seeing people" that he often thought the evenings were the only times he had to do "real work," the careful, minute, infinitely patient, and long-headed calculations which had made him the wealthy man he was.

The room was very hot and close, with all its windows and shutters closed and its curtains drawn to keep the light from showing in the street, a recent air-raid having tightened up the regulations about lights. The American's face was flushed, his eyes hot and smarting, his collar first wilted, and then laid aside. But he was accustomed to pay small heed to discomforts when there was work to be done, and continued obstinately struggling with the problems of cubic feet contained in a compartment of a ship's hold of given dimensions with given curves to the sides. The curve of the sides gave him a great deal of trouble, as he had quite forgotten the formulÆ of abstract mathematics which would have solved the question, never having concerned himself with abstract mathematics since the day he had taken the final examination in that subject.

He sat up, wiping his forehead, rubbing his eyes. Behind the lids, for an instant shut, there swam before his eyes the garden in which he had sat that afternoon, green and hidden and golden. The perfume from the roses floated again about him.

He opened his eyes on the gaudy, banal hotel bedroom, cruelly lighted with the hard gaze of the unveiled electric bulbs. He felt very tired.

"I've half a notion to call that enough for to-night," he said to himself, standing up from the table.

He snapped off the electric lights and opened the shutters. A clear, cool breath of outdoor air came in silently, filling the room and his lungs. The moonlight lay in a wide pool at his feet and on the balcony before his window. He hesitated a moment, glanced out at the sky, and pulled an armchair out on the balcony.

There was a long silence while he puffed at a cigar and while the moon dropped lower. At first he went on thinking of cubic feet and relative weights, but presently his cigar began to glow less redly. After a time it went out unheeded. The hand which held it dropped on the arm of the chair, loosely.

The man stirred, relaxed all his muscles, and stretched himself out in the chair, tipping his head back to see the stars.

He sat thus for a long, long time, while the constellations wheeled slowly over his head. Once he murmured meditatively, "Maybe we do hit it up a little too fast."

He continued looking up at the stars, and presently drew from the contemplation of those vast spaces another remark. It was one which had often casually passed his lips before, but never with the accent of conviction. For never before had he believed it. He said it earnestly, now, in the tone of one who states with respect a profound and pregnant truth: "Well, it takes all kinds of people to make a world."