y, some of which were good in themselves, others that were
quite completely bad. Among the good things, I put what we may call
certain Christian virtues, renunciation, resignation, sympathy with
suffering, and the desire to relieve sufferers. But out of those things
spring very bad ones, useless renunciations, asceticism for its own
sake, mortification of the flesh with nothing to follow, no
corresponding gain that is, and that awful and terrible disease which
devastated England some centuries ago, and from which by heredity of
spirit we suffer now, Puritanism. That was a dreadful plague, the
brutes held and taught that joy and laughter and merriment were evil:
it was a doctrine the most profane and wicked. Why, what is the
commonest crime one sees? A sullen face. That is the truth of the
matter.

"Now all my life I have believed that we are intended to be happy, that
joy is of all gifts the most divine. And when I left London, abandoned
my career, such as it was, I did so because I intended to devote my
life to the cultivation of joy, and, by continuous and unsparing
effort, to be happy. Among people, and in constant intercourse with
others, I did not find it possible; there were too many distractions in
towns and work-rooms, and also too much suffering. So I took one step
backward or forward, as you may choose to put it, and went straight to
Nature, to trees, birds, animals, to all those things which quite
clearly pursue one aim only, which blindly follow the great native
instinct to be happy without any care at all for morality, or human law
or divine law. I wanted, you understand, to get all joy first-hand and
unadulterated, and I think it scarcely exists among men; it is
obsolete."

Darcy turned in his chair.

"Ah, but what makes birds and animals happy?" he asked. "Food, food and
mating."

Frank laughed gently in the stillness.

"Do not think I became a sensualist," he said. "I did not make that
mistake. For the sensualist carries his miseries pick-a-back, and round
his feet is wound the shroud that shall soon enwrap him. I may be mad,
it is true, but I am not so stupid anyhow as to have tried that. No,
what is it that makes puppies play with their own tails, that sends
cats on their prowling ecstatic errands at night?"

He paused a moment.

"So I went to Nature," he said. "I sat down here in this New Forest,
sat down fair and square, and looked. That was my first difficulty, to
sit here quiet without be