es.

"But," I said angrily, "it's not all over, you can make a fight for it
still."

"You don't seem to understand," he answered, "it _is_ all over--the
whole thing. I ran Churchill and his conscious rectitude gang for all
they were worth.... Well, I liked them, I was a fool to give way to
pity.--But I did.--One grows weak among people like you. Of course I
knew that their day was over.... And it's all _over_," he said again
after a long pause.

"And what will you _do_?" I asked, half hysterically.

"I don't just know," he answered; "we've none of us gone under before.
There haven't been enough really to clash until she came."

The dead tranquillity of his manner was overwhelming; there was nothing
to be said. I was in the presence of a man who was not as I was, whose
standard of values, absolute to himself, was not to be measured by any
of mine.

"I suppose I shall cut my throat," he began again.

I noticed with impersonal astonishment that the length of my right side
was covered with the dust of a floor. In my restless motions I came
opposite the fireplace. Above it hung a number of tiny, jewelled frames,
containing daubs of an astonishing lewdness. The riddle grew painful.
What kind of a being could conceive this impossibly barbaric room, could
enshrine those impossibly crude designs, and then fold his hands? I
turned fiercely upon him. "But you are rich enough to enjoy life," I
said.

"What's that?" he asked wearily.

"In the name of God," I shouted, "what do you work for--what have you
been plotting and plotting for, if not to enjoy your life at the last?"
He made a small indefinite motion of ignorance, as if I had propounded
to him a problem that he could not solve, that he did not think worth
the solving.

It came to me as the confirmation of a suspicion--that motion. They had
no joy, these people who were to supersede us; their clear-sightedness
did nothing more for them than just that enabling them to spread
desolation among us and take our places. It had been in her manner all
along, she was like Fate; like the abominable Fate that desolates the
whole length of our lives; that leaves of our hopes, of our plans,
nothing but a hideous jumble of fragments like those of statues, smashed
by hammers; the senseless, inscrutable, joyless Fate that we hate, and
that debases us forever and ever. She had been all that to me ... and to
how many more?

"I used to be a decent personality," I vociferated at hi