isruption of all other ties, impoverishing the natures it should
have enriched. Or don't you think that this happens sometimes, for
instance in married life?"

"I do indeed."

"And, on the other hand," I continued, "it may very well be that one
who passes through life without attaining the fruition of love,
yet with his gaze always set upon it, in and through many other
connections, may yet come closer to the end of his seeking than one
who, having known love, has sunk to rest in it then and there, as
though he had come already to his journey's end, when really he has
only reached an inn upon the road. So that I am far from thinking, as
you pretended to suppose, that the boy and girl on the village green
realize then and there the consummation of the world."

"Still," he objected, "I do not see, in the scheme you put forward,
what place is left for the common business of life--for the things
which really do, for the most part, occupy and possess men's minds,
and the more, in my opinion, the greater their force and capacity."

"You mean, I suppose, war and politics, and such things as that?

"Yes, and generally all that one calls business."

"Well," I said, "what these things mean to those who pursue them, I am
not as competent as you to say. But surely, what they are in
essence is just, like most other activities, relations between human
beings--relations of command and obedience, of respect, admiration,
antagonism, comradeship, infinitely complex, infinitely various, but
still all of them strung, as it were, upon a single thread of passion;
all of them at tension to become something else; all pointing to the
consummation which it is the nature of that which created them to
seek, and all, in that sense, paradoxical as it may sound, only means
to love."

"You don't repudiate such activities then?"

"How should I? I repudiate nothing. I am not trying to judge, but, if
I could, to explain. It is the men of action, I suppose, who have
the greatest extension of life, and sometimes, no doubt, the greatest
intension too. But every man has to live his own way, according to his
opportunities and capacity. Only, as I think myself, all are involved
in the same scheme, and all are driven to the same consummation."

"A consummation in the clouds!"

"I do not know about that; but at any rate, and this is the important
point, that which urges us to it is here and now. Everything is rooted
in it. Our pleasures and pains ali