There he was, back in the old
hopeless circle.

Her touch had wrapped him in a vision world; but across the clearness
of the vision now somehow obtruded the quiet cynicism, the genial scoff
of the Senator's arguments, leaving fierce physical unrest and confused
cross-currents of desire. A mist seemed to blurr all life. The
hemlocks no longer chanted riotous gladness. There was a dirge
to-night of futility, monotonous age-old eons of useless effort, the
useless fall of the forest giant to the dry rot of slug and insect. It
was as if Wayland's spirit stood back and listened to the conflicting
contentions of two other men, the one who wanted to breast the stream
and the one who wanted to go with the current; one full of blind,
red-blood courage, the other full of cold white-corpuscled argument;
one a zealous sportsman playing the game for the game's zest, the other
a quitter because he foresaw no gain.

Not a doubt of it; it was a doleful business, this being stuck half-way
up between heaven and earth cut off from everything but renunciation.
_Why_, was he doing it? What was to be gained? It would have
surprised Wayland if he had disentangled out of his own weltering
thoughts the fact that he had never weighed _gain_ as an argument
before Moyese talked. He had never known the coward's fear of loss.
What was it they had said to him? 'Blocked at every turn,'--'Has your
boasted Federal Government taken any action?'--'This is the Service you
are loyal to,'--'Who of the public gives one damn for right or wrong?'
Had it really come to that? Was that the seat of the trouble? Did the
public care? 'Go lean frying fat for posterity?' All those voices
strident, scoffing; then, part of the night's voiceless voices, that
other undertone--'Nothing accomplished without somebody fighting a
losing battle,'--'What so heroic about a fighter more or less going
down beaten?' It was nothing heroic at all unless you happened to be
the fighter. And what was the sense of accepting a challenge to a
losing battle? 'I want a man who can fight like the Devil.' Well,
that was what the whole world wanted--always had needed and wanted; and
he and hundreds of other Government fellows were applicants for just
such a fighting job. What was it that comical old sermonizing duffer
had ranted about? Oh, yes! If the Devil (of course, there wasn't a
Devil), if the Devil came tempting to-day 'twould be such a place as
this.' 'Etches, he would