xml:lang="it">Settignano for the season. We expect to arrive there early in May, and we want you to come to us for just as long a visit as you can arrange. You won’t disappoint me, will you, dear Uncle Peabody? We all have been broken-hearted that you have so long delayed your return, and one of the events in our plans for Florence to which I am looking forward with the greatest eagerness is this visit with you. Write and tell me how your work progresses, but don’t say ‘I told you so.’ This would show that you really expected it all the time, and your favorite argument would lose its force. Just say that you will come to us at Settignano.”

The letter itself showed that Helen had changed much during the months which had elapsed since he had last seen her. There was a more serious undertone and a broader outlook,—due undoubtedly to Armstrong’s influence. Uncle Peabody wondered whether Helen could have been attracted to this man by her admiration for his mental strength rather than by any real sentiment, perhaps mistaking the one for the other. This was the point he wished to settle in his own mind, and this was why he had studied them both, from the moment of his arrival, much more carefully than either one of them realized.

Armstrong was a remarkable man, as Helen had said. Even in the few hours he had known him, Uncle Peabody found much to admire. It was true that his manner toward Helen showed indulgence, almost as to a child rather than to a wife; but his devotion was entirely obvious, and this relation was to be expected after reading Helen’s letter. Still, Mr. Cartwright told himself, the existence of this relation necessitated a certain readjustment before a perfection of united interests could be attained. Armstrong was bound to be the dominating force, and Helen must inevitably respond to this new influence, strange as it now seemed to her. His knowledge of her sympathetic and intuitive grasp of his own pet theories gave him confidence to believe that this response would be equally prompt and comprehensive.

Henry Peabody Cartwright was distinctly a citizen of the world. Boston had been his birthplace, Boston had been the base of his eminently successful business operations, and his name still figured in the list of the city’s “largest taxpayers.” Beyond this, the city of his early activity had, during the past twenty years, seen him only as a visitor at periodic intervals. He had emerged from his commercial environment at the age of forty, with a firm determination to gratify his ideals.

Fortunately for him, and for mankind as well, his ideals were not fully crystallized when he set out to gratify them. Boston was entirely satisfactory to him as an abiding-place, but he felt a leaven at work within him which demanded a larger arena than even the outlying territory of Greater Boston covered. He started, therefore, in the late eighties for a trip around the world, with the definite purpose, as he himself announced, of “giving things a chance to happen to him.”

“I have no schedule and no plans,” he said to those who questioned him. “I shall ‘hitch my wagon to a star,’ but always with my grip near at hand, so that I may change stars upon a moment’s notice.”

There were no immediate family ties to interfere with the carrying-out of what seemed to his friends to be rather quixotic ideas. There may have been some youthful romance, but, if so, no one ever succeeded in learning anything of it from him.

“It is all perfectly simple,” he once good-naturedly replied to a persistent relative. “The girls I was willing to marry would not have me, and those who would have me I was not willing to marry. I used to think that I would become more attractive as I grew older, but I have given up that idea now. Once I tried to rub a freckle off with sand-paper and pumice-stone and found blood under the skin; but the freckle—the same old freckle—is there to this day.”

His devotion to women in the composite was consistent and sincere; the fondness which existed between himself and his brother’s family was such that his departure had left a distinct void, and his visits home were events circled with red ink in the family calendar. He enjoyed these visits no less than they; but with never more than a day or two of warning he would announce his intention of leaving for Egypt or India or some spot more or less remote in his quest for the unexpected. To the reproaches which were levelled at him, he replied, with a smile which defied controversy:

“I am just as sorry not to be with you all as you can possibly be to have me away; but I have educated myself to the separation, and have thus overcome the necessity for personal propinquity.”

On that first trip around the world Uncle Peabody found one of his ideals, although he did not realize its vast importance until several years later. Japan appealed to him, and the longer he remained there the more impressed he became with certain of the national characteristics. First of all, he marvelled at the evenness of temper which the people displayed, at their endurance, their patience. He watched the carefulness with which they weighed the importance of each problem before accepting its responsibility, and their utter abandon in carrying it through when once undertaken. This was twenty years before the Russo-Japanese war, and he had come among them with the existing Occidental estimate of their paganism and barbarity. It may have been a species of incredulity leading to curiosity which induced him to remain among them, but as a result of his sojourn he discovered that they were philosophers rather than fatalists, geniuses rather than barbarians.

He questioned his new hosts, when he came to know them better, and was told quite seriously and quite naturally that they never became angry, because anger produced poison in the system and retarded digestion; that upon digestion depended health; that upon health depended happiness, and upon happiness depended personal efficiency and life itself. They explained that forethought was one of the cardinal factors of their creed, but added that its antithesis, fear-thought, was equally important as an element to be eliminated. They called his attention to the fact that they did not live upon what they ate, but upon what they digested, and that by masticating their food more thoroughly than he did they secured from the smaller quantity the same amount of nourishment without needlessly overloading their systems with undigested food which could not possibly be assimilated.

This last theory did not altogether appeal to Peabody Cartwright at first. His friends at the Somerset Club still held memories of his epicurean proclivities, and they were not weary even yet of recalling the time when he had won a goodly wager by naming, blindfolded, five different vintages of Burgundy and Bordeaux. But the more he thought it over the more convinced he became that the something to which he had promised to give a chance had really happened to him. He pondered, he experimented—but he still continued to eat larger quantities of food than the Japanese.

A year later he was in Italy, and in Venice Mr. Cartwright suddenly discovered that he had found the geographical centre of the civilized world. With Venice as the starting-point, one could reach London or Constantinople, St. Petersburg or New York, with equal exertion. Venice, therefore, became his adopted home, although it could claim no more of his presence than any one of a dozen other cities in the four quarters of the globe. During the twenty years, he had succeeded in making himself a part of each one—had become a veritable citizen of the world, but by no means a man without a country.

Italy served to drive home the