ale ideas.... But now the cataclysm had come within himself, and he
was brought to doubt and self-examination. Had he not denied too much?
Had he not carried abnegation too far? Had he not thwarted powers in
himself which were essential even to his impersonal purpose? Was it
paradoxically true that a man must be a person before he can be
impersonal? His empty room, his books, his pile of manuscript! What a
life! Had he after all been only a coward? Had he only shrunk into
this silence to avoid the pain and boredom of reiteration?

At first his concern was all with the havoc wrought in his work from
the moment when Clara swept into his imagination, but he was soon
compelled to brush that aside and to grapple with the more serious fact
that she had crept into his heart, which for the first time was active
and demanding its share in his being. Then arose the horror that it
was repelled by what it found in his imagination, cold, solitary,
tortured souls, creatures who should be left to eke out their misery in
private solitude, who had nothing to justify their exhibition to the
world, who shamelessly reproached their fellows for the results of
their own weakness, wretched clinging women, men hard as iron in their
egoism.... His heart could not endure it, but until his heart had
flooded his vision with its warmth he could not move, could come to no
decision, except that he must leave the marvellous girl unmolested.

The furious will that had animated him through all his solitary years
resented this intrusion, and was in revolt against the reason and the
logic of his heart. That will in him had reduced the social system to
its logical end, the destruction of the young by the old, and would
allow his creative faculty no other material. It must have nothing but
a bleak world of bitterness, and this it had imposed upon both his
happy temperament and his generous heart, so that even in life he had
been able to exercise nothing but a rather feeble kindness. His will
had been to hold up to the world a picture of the end to which it must
come, since splendour wrung from desolation must end in desolation.

And suddenly his will was defied by this amazing girl, all youth, all
joy, revealing the eternal loveliness of the human spirit that endures
though Empires fade away and societies come to chaos.

Very, very slowly, his will, which drew its force from the hypnotic
influence of horror, was thrust back, and light crept i