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132 put this question with the greater earnestness. "And why has she given me a most violent desire towards sculpture and an equally violent desire to leave off work directly I begin it, eh? Let's have some more coffee. I put it you, these things puzzle me, Ponderevo. They dishearten me. They keep me in bed."

He had an air of having saved up these difficulties for me for some time. He sat with his chin almost touching his knees, sucking at his pipe.

"That's what I mean," he went on, "when I say life is getting on to me as extraordinary queer. I don't see my game, nor why I was invited. And I don't make anything of the world outside either. "What do you make of it?"

"London,*" I began. "It's—so enormous!"

"Isn't it! And it's all up to nothing. You find chaps keeping grocers' shops—why the devil, Ponderevo, do they keep grocers' shops? They all do it very carefully, very steadily, very meanly. You find people running about and doing the most remarkable things—being policemen, for example, and burglars. They go about these businesses quite gravely and earnestly. I—somehow—can't go about mine. Is there any sense in it at all—anywhere?"

"There must be sense in it," I said. "We're young."

"We're young—yes. But one must inquire. The grocer's a grocer because, I suppose, he sees he comes in there. Feels that on the whole it amounts to a call. But the bother is I don't see where I come in at all. Do you?"

"Where you come in?"

"No, where you come in."

"Not exactly, yet," I said. "I want to do some