on
freedom at any cost, and his rage against Sir Isaac, who had possessed
and wasted all that he would have cherished so tenderly, grew to nearly
uncontrollable proportions. "Here was your life," he said, "your
beautiful life opening and full--full of such dear seeds of delight and
wonder, calling for love, ready for love, and there came this _Clutch_,
this Clutch that embodied all the narrow meanness of existence, and
gripped and crumpled you and spoilt you.... For I tell you my dear you
don't know; you don't begin to know...."

He disregarded her shy eyes, giving way to his gathered wrath.

"And he conquers! This little monster of meanness, he conquers to the
end--his dead hand, his dead desires, out of the grave they hold you!
Always, always, it is Clutch that conquers; the master of life! I was a
fool to dream, a fool to hope. I forgot. I thought only of you and
I--that perhaps you and I----"

He did not heed her little sound of protest. He went on to a bitter
denunciation of the rule of jealousy in the world, forgetting that the
sufferer under that rule in this case was his own consuming jealousy.
That was life. Life was jealousy. It was all made up of fierce
graspings, fierce suspicions, fierce resentments; men preyed upon one
another even as the beasts they came from; reason made its crushed way
through their conflict, crippled and wounded by their blows at one
another. The best men, the wisest, the best of mankind, the stars of
human wisdom, were but half ineffectual angels carried on the shoulders
and guided by the steps of beasts. One might dream of a better world of
men, of civilizations and wisdom latent in our passion-strained minds,
of calms and courage and great heroical conquests that might come, but
they lay tens of thousands of years away and we had to live, we had to
die, no more than a herd of beasts tormented by gleams of knowledge we
could never possess, of happiness for which we had no soul. He grew more
and more eloquent as these thoughts sprang and grew in his mind.

"Of course I am absurd," he cried. "All men are absurd. Man is the
absurd animal. We have parted from primordial motives--lust and hate and
hunger and fear, and from all the tragic greatness of uncontrollable
fate and we, we've got nothing to replace them. We are comic--comic!
Ours is the stage of comedy in life's history, half lit and
blinded,--and we fumble. As absurd as a kitten with its poor little head
in a bag. There's you