Rudyard Kipling 105 ber, I’ve seen twelve hundred men dead in toadstoolbeds. It’s only the voice of the tiniest little fraction of people that makes success. The real world doesn’t care a tinker’s — doesn’t care a bit. For aught you or I know, every man in the world may be arguing with a Maisie of his own.” “Poor Maisie!” “Poor Dick, I think. Do you believe while he’s fighting for what’s dearer than his life he wants to look at a picture? And even if he did, and if all the world did, and a thousand million people rose up and shouted hymns to my honor and glory, would that make up to me for the knowledge that you were out shopping in the Edgware Road on a rainy day without an umbrella? Now we'll go to the station.” “But you said on the beach —” persisted Maisie, with a certain-fear: Dick groaned aloud: “Yes, I know what I said. My work is everything I have, or am, or hope to be, to me, and I believe I’ve learnt the law that governs it; but I’ve some lingering sense of fun left, — though you’ve nearly knocked it out of me. I can just see that it isn’t everything to all the world. Do what I say, and not what I do.” Maisie was careful not to reopen debatable matters, and they returned to London joyously. The terminus stopped Dick in the midst of an eloquent harangue on the beauties of exercise. He would buy Maisie a horse, — such a horse as never yet bowed head to bit, — would stable it, with a companion, some twenty miles from London, and Maisie, solely for her health’s sake should ride with him twice or thrice a week. “That’s absurd,” said she. “It wouldn’t be proper.” “Now, who in all London tonight would have sufficient interest or audacity to call us two to account for anything we chose to do?”