progress making a buzz in the newspapers. Well! as I said, it was
curious. Curious I should have found my girl in such surroundings,
growing there like a straight, healthy plant, just blooming in a bed
among all those old decayed and discarded people of the world. Curious,
too, I thought, that these people, like old Croasan, had rejected life.
Though they were, if anything, less estimable than he was, for he defied
life, in his silly, senile, drunken way, while they seemed simply scared
of it.

"But we weren't. We had, you may say, nothing in common, but we were not
afraid of life, and that is the great thing. To me it was wonderful, the
experience of courage and curiosity, because I had been brought up to
shrink from contact with reality, to keep myself unspotted from the
world. It may be, therefore, that I am only describing to you perfectly
normal emotions. It may be that I had profited nothing by my long
probation. It may be: I cannot tell. I am not a believer in a vicarious
existence, living by proxy and tallying each minute, each crisis, by
something in a book. Nobody could love literature more than I; but I am
sure at the same time that, while life may chance to be literature,
literature is not life. It can't be. There was the doctor with his Book
of the Dead. Do I judge him? Not I. It may be he was a great genius who
will be immortal as we count immortality. To him I was, possibly, a mere
annoyance, an impertinent interlude in his entrancing studies of his
mouldy mummies, indecorously calling his attention to the existence of a
modern effete civilization. I don't know. I never took the trouble to
find out. He never materialized again. He moved back into the shadows; a
name, tall, pale and with a black beard, passing in his little launch,
at the call of the code-flag P.

"Well, there it was, a vague and inconclusive episode, like so many
others in my life. So many, in fact, that as I look back at it all, if
it were not just for Rosa and the children, the sum-total of life for me
would be futility. When I read biography, and I have read a good deal of
it, I reflect upon the achievements of men, their loves and hates, their
steady ambitions hacking away at obstacles until victory is in sight and
the guerdon won, or their glorious deaths in action and the fullness of
their posthumous fame, and I--I doubt. There is a tinge of theatricality
about it all. I doubt. It is not so much that I regret my own failure to
cop