rst-floor library. He usually sought the
library at this time of day; a little group of men, all of whom he knew
well, were as a rule to be found there, and they were friendly, not
overly argumentative, restful. Now he paused between the heavy
portieres, partly drawn aside, and peered for a moment into the room.
The light from the hall behind him made a pool of faint illumination at
his feet, but beyond that there was only a brown darkness, scented with
the smell of books in leather bindings, in which the figures of several
men, sprawled out in big chairs before the window, were faintly visible.
The window itself, a square of blank fog-blurred dusk, served merely to
heighten the obscurity. Mr. Vandusen, a small, plump shadow in the
surrounding shadows, found an unoccupied chair and sank into it
silently.

"And that's just it," said Maury suddenly, and as if he was picking up
the threads of a conversation dropped but a moment before; "and that's
just the point"--and his usually gentle voice was heavy with a
didacticism unlike itself--"that affects most deeply a man of my
temperament and generation. Nemesis--fate--whatever you choose to call
it. The fear that perhaps it doesn't exist at all. That there is no such
thing; or worse yet, that in some strange, monstrous way man has made
himself master of it--has no longer to fear it. And man isn't fit to be
altogether master of anything as yet; he's still too much half devil,
half ape. There's this damned choked feeling that the world's at loose
ends. I don't know how to put it--as if, that is, we, with all the
devilish new knowledge we've acquired within the past fifty years, the
devilish new machines we've invented, have all at once become stronger
than God; taken the final power out of the hands of the authority,
whatever it is, toward which we used to look for a reckoning and
balancing in the end, no matter what agony might lie between. Perhaps
it's all right--I don't know. But it's an upsetting conclusion to ask a
man of my generation offhandedly to accept. I was brought up--we all
were--to believe in an ordered, if obscure, philosophical doctrine that
evil inevitably finds its own punishment, and now--!"

"But--" began Tomlinson.

Maury interrupted him. "Yes, yes," he said, "I know all that; I know
what you are going to say. I am perfectly aware of the fact that the
ways of Nemesis are supposed to be slow ways--exceedingly. I am aware of
the fact that in the Christian