hing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that
swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of
the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the
secret of its nothingness. Thoughts came tumbling over one another in
Philip's eager fancy, and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He
felt inclined to leap and sing. He had not been so happy for months.

"Oh, life," he cried in his heart, "Oh life, where is thy sting?"

For the same uprush of fancy which had shown him with all the force of
mathematical demonstration that life had no meaning, brought with it
another idea; and that was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the
Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the
pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one
was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might
a man look at his life, that it made a pattern. There was as little need
to do this as there was use. It was merely something he did for his own
pleasure. Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings,
his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or
beautiful; and though it might be no more than an illusion that he had the
power of selection, though it might be no more than a fantastic
legerdemain in which appearances were interwoven with moonbeams, that did
not matter: it seemed, and so to him it was. In the vast warp of life (a
river arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the
background to his fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing was
important, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the
various strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, the
most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to
manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but
there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not
enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be
discovered a more troubling grace. Some lives, and Hayward's was among
them, the blind indifference of chance cut off while the design was still
imperfect; and then the solace was comfortable that it did not matter;
other lives, such as Cronshaw's, offered a pattern which was difficult to
follow, the point of view had to be shifted and old standards had to be
altered before one could understand that such a l