wly--and in a little while we too must
die----"

"It can be done," said my companion.

"It could be avoided," said I.

"It shall be in the days to come. There is food enough for all,
shelter for all, wealth enough for all. Men need only know it and will
it. And yet we have this!"

"And so much like this!" said I....

So we talked and were tormented.

And I remember how later we found ourselves on Westminster Bridge,
looking back upon the long sweep of wrinkled black water that
reflected lights and palaces and the flitting glow of steamboats, and
by that time we had talked ourselves past our despair. We perceived
that what was splendid remained splendid, that what was mysterious
remained insoluble for all our pain and impatience. But it was clear
to us the thing for us two to go upon was not the good of the present
nor the evil, but the effort and the dream of the finer order, the
fuller life, the banishment of suffering, to come.

"We want all the beauty that is here," said my friend, "and more also.
And none of these distresses. We are here--we know not whence nor
why--to want that and to struggle to get it, you and I and ten
thousand others, thinly hidden from us by these luminous darknesses.
We work, we pass--whither I know not, but out of our knowing. But we
work--we are spurred to work. That yonder--those people are the
spur--for us who cannot answer to any finer appeal. Each in our
measure must do. And our reward? Our reward is our faith. Here is my
creed to-night. I believe--out of me and the Good Will in me and my
kind there comes a regenerate world--cleansed of suffering and sorrow.
That is our purpose here--to forward that. It gives us work for all
our lives. Why should we ask to know more? Our errors--our
sins--to-night they seem to matter very little. If we stumble and roll
in the mud, if we blunder against each other and hurt one another----"

"We have to go on," said my friend, after a pause.

We stood for a time in silence.

One's own personal problems came and went like a ripple on the water.
Even that whisky dealer's advertisement upon the southern bank became
through some fantastic transformation a promise, an enigmatical
promise flashed up the river reach in letters of fire. London was
indeed very beautiful that night. Without hope she would have seemed
not only as beautiful but as terrible as a black panther crouching on
her prey. Our hope redeemed her. Beyond her dark and meretricious