there," cried
Algitha. "I am, at times, almost in despair at the mass of evil to be
fought against, but somehow you always make me feel, Professor, that the
race has all the qualities necessary for redemption enfolded within
itself."

"But assuredly it has!" cried the Professor. "And assuredly those
redeeming qualities will germinate. Otherwise the race would extinguish
itself in cruelty and corruption. Let people talk as they please about
the struggle for existence, it is through the development of the human
mind and the widening of human mercy that better things will come."

"One sees, now and then, in a flash, what the world may some day be,"
said Hadria. "The vision comes, perhaps, with the splendour of a spring
morning, or opens, scroll-like, in a flood of noble music. It sounds
unreal, yet it brings a sense of conviction that is irresistible."

"I think it was Pythagoras who declared that the woes of men are the
work of their own hands," said the Professor. "So are their joys.
Nothing ever shakes my belief that what the mind of man can imagine,
that it can achieve."

"But there are so many pulling the wrong way," said Algitha sadly.

"Ah, one man may be miserable through the deeds of others; the race can
only be miserable through its own."

After a pause, Algitha put a question: How far was it justifiable to
give pain to others in following one's own idea of right and reasonable?
How far might one attempt to live a life of intellectual integrity and
of the widest mercy that one's nature would stretch to?

Professor Fortescue saw no limits but those of one's own courage and
ability. Algitha pointed out that in most lives the limit occurred much
sooner. If "others"--those tyrannical and absorbent "others"--had
intricately bound up their notions of happiness with the prevention of
any such endeavour, and if those notions were of the usual negative,
home-comfort-and-affection order, narrowly personal, fruitful in nothing
except a sort of sentimental egotism that spread over a whole
family--what Hadria called an _egotism a douze_--how far ought these
ideas to be respected, and at what cost?

Professor Fortescue was unqualified in his condemnation of the sentiment
which erected sacrificial altars in the family circle. He spoke
scornfully of the doctrine of renunciation, so applied, and held the
victims who brought their gifts of power and liberty more culpable than
those who demanded them, since the duty of res