who come after will be easier and happier;
whereas the Pardiggle reformer literally enjoys the presence of the
refuse, because his broom has something to sweep away.

And the strangest thing of all is that we move forward, in a bewildered
company, knowing that our every act and word is the resultant of ancient
forces, not one of which we can change or modify in the least degree,
while we live under the instinctive delusion, which survives the
severest logic, that we can always and at every moment do to a certain
extent what we choose to do. What the truth is that connects and
underlies these two phenomena, we have not the least conception; but
meanwhile each remains perfectly obvious and apparently true. To myself,
the logical belief is infinitely the more hopeful and sustaining of the
two; for if the movement of progress is in the hands of God, we are at
all events taking our mysterious and wonderful part in a great dream
that is being evolved, far more vast and amazing than we can comprehend;
whereas if I felt that it was left to ourselves to choose, and
that, hampered as we feel ourselves to be by innumerable chains of
circumstance, we could yet indeed originate action and impede the
underlying Will, I should relapse into despair before a problem full of
sickening complexities and admitted failures. Meanwhile, I do what I am
given to do; I perceive what I am allowed to perceive; I suffer what is
appointed for me to suffer; but all with a hope that I may yet see the
dawn break upon the sunlit sea, beyond the dark hills of time.

X. THE DRAMATIC SENSE

The other day I was walking along a road at Cambridge, engulfed in a
torrent of cloth-capped and coated young men all flowing one way--going
to see or, as it is now called, to "watch" a match. We met a little
girl walking with her governess in the opposite direction. There was a
baleful light of intellect in the child's eye, and a preponderance of
forehead combined with a certain lankness of hair betrayed, I fancy,
an ingenuous academical origin. The girl was looking round her with an
unholy sense of superiority, and as we passed she said to her governess
in a clear-cut, complacent tone, "We're quite exceptional, aren't we?"
To which the governess replied briskly, "Laura, don't be ridiculous!"
To which exhortation Laura replied with self-satisfied pertinacity, "No,
but we ARE exceptional, aren't we?"

Ah, Miss Laura, I thought to myself, you are one of those p