e tired of life than I think you
are. I know you."

"I'm afraid you do," agreed Amory reluctantly. "It just seemed an easy
way out of everything--when I think of another useless, draggy year."

"Yes, I know; but to tell you the truth, I'm not worried about you; you
seem to me to be progressing perfectly naturally."

"No," Amory objected. "I've lost half my personality in a year."

"Not a bit of it!" scoffed Monsignor. "You've lost a great amount of
vanity and that's all."

"Lordy! I feel, anyway, as if I'd gone through another fifth form at St.
Regis's."

"No." Monsignor shook his head. "That was a misfortune; this has been
a good thing. Whatever worth while comes to you, won't be through the
channels you were searching last year."

"What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?"

"Perhaps in itself... but you're developing. This has given you time to
think and you're casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and
the superman and all. People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you
did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in,
we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind
dominance is concerned--we'd just make asses of ourselves."

"But, Monsignor, I can't do the next thing."

"Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself. I
can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe
on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall."

"Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I
should do."

"We have to do it because we're not personalities, but personages."

"That's a good line--what do you mean?"

"A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane
you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost
entirely; it lowers the people it acts on--I've seen it vanish in a
long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next
thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought
of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have
been hung--glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those
things with a cold mentality back of them."

"And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off when I
needed them." Amory continued the simile eagerly.

"Yes, that's it; when you feel that your garnered prestige and talents
and all that are hung out, yo