ed.

"Well, as you kneel there, I notice in you a kind of angular grandeur, a
grotesque touch of the sublime, that was not evident to me before. If I
were a sculptor, I would like to model you like that. I cannot explain
why--I am just saying what I feel. I have never felt any impulse towards
art until this morning." He twisted his moustache. "Yes, you have quite
an interesting face, Harden. I can see in it evidence that you have
suffered intensely. You have taken life too seriously. You have worked
too hard. You are stunted and deformed with work."

I regarded him with some astonishment.

"Work is all very well," he continued, "but this morning I see with
singular clarity that it is only a means of development. My dear Harden,
if it is overdone, it simply dwarfs the soul. Our generation has not
recognized this properly."

"But you were always an apostle of hard work," I remarked irritably.

"May be." He made a gesture of dismissal. "Now, I am an Immortal, and
you are an Immortal. The background to life has changed. Formerly, the
idea of death lurked constantly in the depths of the unconscious mind,
and by its vaguely-felt influences spurred us on to continual exertion.
That is all changed. We have, at one stroke, removed this dire spectre.
We are free."

He rose suddenly and flung the mirror across the room.

"What do we need mirrors for?" he cried. "It is only when we fear death
that we need mirrors to tell us how long we have to live." He strode
over to me and halted. "You seem in no hurry to get up from that
carpet," he observed. His remark made me realize that I had been
kneeling for some minutes. Now this was rather odd. I am restless by
nature and rarely remain in one position for any length of time, and to
stay like that, kneeling before the window, was indeed curious. I got up
and moved to the dressing-table, thinking. Sarakoff must have been
thinking in the same direction, for he asked me a question.

"Did you realize you were kneeling?"

"Yes," I replied. "I knew what I was doing. It merely did not occur to
me that I should change my position."

"The explanation is simple," said the Russian. "Restlessness, or the
idea that we must change our position, or that we should be doing
something else, belongs to the anxious side of life; and the anxious
side of life is nourished and kept vigorous by the latent fear of death.
All that is removed from you, and therefore you see no reason why you
should do a