r soul of man! Mewing. We're all at it, the poets,
the teachers. How can anyone hope to escape? Why should I escape? What
am I that I should expect to be anything but a thwarted lover, a man
mocked by his own attempts at service? Why should I expect to discover
beauty and think that it won't be snatched away from me? All my life is
comic--the story of this--this last absurdity could it make anything but
a comic history? and yet within me my heart is weeping tears. The
further one has gone, the deeper one wallows in the comic marsh. I am
one of the newer kind of men, one of those men who cannot sit and hug
their credit and their honour and their possessions and be content. I
have seen the light of better things than that, and because of my
vision, because of my vision and for no other reason I am the most
ridiculous of men. Always I have tried to go out from myself to the
world and give. Those early books of mine, those meretricious books in
which I pretended all was so well with the world,--I did them because I
wanted to give happiness and contentment and to be happy in the giving.
And all the watchers and the grippers, the strong silent men and the
calculating possessors of things, the masters of the world, they grinned
at me. How I lied to please! But I tell you for all their grinning, in
my very prostitution there was a better spirit than theirs in their
successes. If I had to live over again----"

He left that hypothesis uncompleted.

"And now," he said, with a curious contrast between his voice and the
exaltation of his sentiments, "now that I am to be your tormented, your
emasculated lover to the very end of things, emasculated by laws I hate
and customs I hate and vile foresights that I despise----"

He paused, his thread lost for a moment.

"Because," he said, "I'm going to do it. I'm going to do what I can. I'm
going to be as you wish me to be, to help you, to serve you.... If you
can't come to meet me, I'll meet you. I can't help but love you, I
can't do without you. Never in my life have I subscribed willingly to
the idea of renunciation. I've hated renunciation. But if there is no
other course but renunciation, renunciation let it be. I'm bitter about
this, bitter to the bottom of my soul, but at least I'll have you know I
love you. Anyhow...."

His voice broke. There were tears in his eyes.

And on the very crest of these magnificent capitulations his soul
rebelled. He turned about so swiftly that for