It is only when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the comfort of complete self-deception.

The Assistant Commissioner did not like his work at home.

The police work he had been engaged on in a distant part of the globe had the saving character of an irregular sort of warfare or at least the risk and excitement of open-air sport.

His real abilities, which were mainly of an administrative order, were combined with an adventurous disposition.

Chained to a desk in the thick of four millions of men, he considered himself the victim of an ironic fate--the same, no doubt, which had brought about his marriage with a woman exceptionally sensitive in the matter of colonial climate, besides other limitations testifying to the delicacy of her nature--and her tastes.