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ing in the lake, hunting, but careful not to overtax my returning strength. I was not in love with life, far from it! But I had no intention of adding invalidism to my other disintegrations. In the evening I played cards with my secretary or practised at the piano, with some revival of my old interest in music. I read little, even in the newspapers. I was become, save perhaps for my music, an automaton. But, although I did not improve in appearance, my health was completely restored, and when the war came I was in perfect condition for the arduous task I immediately undertook. Moreover, my mind, torpid for a year, was free and refreshed for those practical details it must grapple with at once. I turned the Zattiany palace in Buda Pesth into a hospital. And then for four years I was again an automaton, but this time a necessary and useful one. When I thought about myself at all, it seemed to me that this selfless and strenuous interval was the final severance from my old life. If Society in Europe today were miraculously restored to its pre-war brilliancy--indifferent to little but excitement and pleasure--there would be nothing in it for me. "Now I come to the miracle." And while she recapitulated what she had told the women at Mrs. Oglethorpe's luncheon, Clavering listened without chaos in his accompanying thoughts. "Certainly, man's span is too brief now," she concluded. "He withers and dies at an age when, if he has lived sanely--and when a man abuses his natural functions he generally dies before old age, anyhow--he is beginning to see life as a whole, with that detachment that comes when his personal hold on life and affairs is relaxing, when he has realized his mistakes, and has attained a mental and moral orientation which could be of inestimable service to his fellow men, and to civilization in general. What you call crankiness in old people, so trying to the younger generations, does not arise from natural hatefulness of disposition and a released congenital selfishness, but from atrophying glands, and, no doubt, a subtle rebellion against nature for consigning men to ineptitude when they should be entering upon their best period of usefulness, and philosophical as well as active enjoyment of life. "Science has defeated nature at many points. The isolation of germs, the discovery of toxins and serums, the triumph over diseases that once wasted whole nations and brought about the fall of empire
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