, but that isn't the root of the
matter with me. There's no humour in my blood. I'm in earnest in warp
and woof. I stumble and flounder, but I know that over all these merry
immediate things, there are other things that are great and serene, very
high, beautiful things--the reality. I haven't got it, but it's there
nevertheless. I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable
goddesses. I've never seen the goddesses nor ever shall--but it takes
all the fun out of the mud--and at times I fear it takes all the
kindliness, too.

But I'm talking of things I can't expect the reader to understand,
because I don't half understand them myself. There is something links
things for me, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air, something
there was in Marion's form and colour, something I find and lose in
Mantegna's pictures, something in the lines of these boats I make. (You
should see X2, my last and best!)

I can't explain myself, I perceive. Perhaps it all comes to this, that
I am a hard and morally limited cad with a mind beyond my merits.
Naturally I resist that as a complete solution. Anyhow, I had a sense of
inexorable need, of distress and insufficiency that was unendurable, and
for a time this aeronautical engineering allayed it....

In the end of this particular crisis of which I tell so badly, I
idealised Science. I decided that in power and knowledge lay the
salvation of my life, the secret that would fill my need; that to these
things I would give myself.

I emerged at last like a man who has been diving in darkness, clutching
at a new resolve for which he had groped desperately and long.

I came into the inner office suddenly one day--it must have been just
before the time of Marion's suit for restitution--and sat down before my
uncle.

"Look here," I said, "I'm sick of this."

"HulLO!" he answered, and put some papers aside.

"What's up, George?"

"Things are wrong."

"As how?"

"My life," I said, "it's a mess, an infinite mess."

"She's been a stupid girl, George," he said; "I partly understand. But
you're quit of her now, practically, and there's just as good fish in
the sea--"

"Oh! it's not that!" I cried. "That's only the part that shows. I'm
sick--I'm sick of all this damned rascality."

"Eh? Eh?" said my uncle. "WHAT--rascality?"

"Oh, YOU know. I want some STUFF, man. I want something to hold on to. I
shall go amok if I don't get it. I'm a different sort of beast from
you. You flo