. I don't discuss that any more."

"I don't limit myself too narrowly," he added. "After all, the work is
all one. We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern state,
joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England rising out
of the decaying old... we are the real statesmen--I like that use of
'statesmen.'..."

"Yes," I said with many doubts. "Yes, of course...."

Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a deepening
benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very fairly kept his
word. He has lived for social service and to do vast masses of
useful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of the days of
arid administrative plodding and of contention still more arid and
unrewarded, that he must have spent! His little affectations of gesture
and manner, imitative affectations for the most part, have increased,
and the humorous beam and the humorous intonations have become a thing
he puts on every morning like an old coat. His devotion is mingled with
a considerable whimsicality, and they say he is easily flattered by
subordinates and easily offended into opposition by colleagues; he has
made mistakes at times and followed wrong courses, still there he is,
a flat contradiction to all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who
has foregone any chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths
to distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the
community. He does it without any fee or reward except his personal
self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any hope
of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable Rationalist. No
doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of recognition. No
doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power, from the spending
and husbanding of large sums of public money, and from the inevitable
proprietorship he must feel in the fair, fine, well-ordered schools he
has done so much to develop. "But for me," he can say, "there would have
been a Job about those diagrams, and that subject or this would have
been less ably taught."...

The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not to
content at any rate to keep him working. Of course he covets the
notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of his
mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get credit.
Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they were noting,
with little mean s