greed with him. If only we were all daemon
and nothing else philosophy would be easier. Unfortunately, there is
more of us.

Another argument much approved by philosophy is that nothing matters,
because a hundred years hence, say, at the outside, we shall be dead.
What we really want is a philosophy that will enable us to get along
while we are still alive. I am not worrying about my centenary; I am
worrying about next quarter-day. I feel that if other people would only
go away, and leave me--income-tax collectors, critics, men who come round
about the gas, all those sort of people--I could be a philosopher myself.
I am willing enough to make believe that nothing matters, but they are
not. They say it is going to be cut off, and talk about judgment
summonses. I tell them it won't trouble any of us a hundred years hence.
They answer they are not talking of a hundred years hence, but of this
thing that was due last April twelvemonth. They won't listen to my
daemon. He does not interest them. Nor, to be candid, does it comfort
myself very much, this philosophical reflection that a hundred years
later on I'll be sure to be dead--that is, with ordinary luck. What
bucks me up much more is the hope that they will be dead. Besides, in a
hundred years things may have improved. I may not want to be dead. If I
were sure of being dead next morning, before their threat of cutting off
that water or that gas could by any possibility be carried out, before
that judgment summons they are bragging about could be made returnable, I
might--I don't say I should--be amused, thinking how I was going to dish
them. The wife of a very wicked man visited him one evening in prison,
and found him enjoying a supper of toasted cheese.

"How foolish of you, Edward," argued the fond lady, "to be eating toasted
cheese for supper. You know it always affects your liver. All day long
to-morrow you will be complaining."

"No, I shan't," interrupted Edward; "not so foolish as you think me. They
are going to hang me to-morrow--early."

There is a passage in Marcus Aurelius that used to puzzle me until I hit
upon the solution. A foot-note says the meaning is obscure. Myself, I
had gathered this before I read the foot-note. What it is all about I
defy any human being to explain. It might mean anything; it might mean
nothing. The majority of students incline to the latter theory, though a
minority maintain there is a meaning, if only it