sery, which had become more active since
his strength had stirred out of sleep. If he did not die how was he
going to live? He had lived by the affections. Could he live by the
lusts? He had no personal ambitions; he had no avarice to prompt him to
energy; he was not in love with himself. Suddenly he realized the value
of egoism to the egoist, and that he was very poor because he was really
not an egoist by nature. If he had been, if he were, perhaps things
would have gone better for him in the past, would be more endurable now.
But he had lived not to himself but to another.

He told himself that to do that was the rankest folly. At any rate he
would never do that again. But the unselfishness of love had become a
habit with him. Even in his extreme youth he had instinctively saved
up, moved, no doubt, by an inherent desire to have as large a gift as
possible ready when the moment for giving came.

If he lived on he must live for himself; he must reverse all his rules
of conduct; he must fling himself into the life of self-gratification.
He had come to believe that the men who trample are the men who succeed
and who have the happiest lives. Sensitiveness does not pay; loving
consideration of others brings no real reward; men do not get what they
give. It is the hard and the passionate man who is the victor in life,
not the man who is tender, thoughtful, even unselfish in the midst
of his passion. Self-control--what a reward Dion had received for the
self-control of his youth!

If he lived he would cast it away.

He sat at his window till dawn, till the sea woke and the hills of Asia
were visible under a clear and delicate sky. He leaned out and felt the
atmosphere of beginning that is peculiar to the first hour of daylight.
Could he begin again? It seemed impossible. Yet now he felt he could
not deprive himself of life. Suicide is a cowardly act, even though
a certain kind of courage must prompt the pulling of the trigger, the
insertion of the knife, or the pouring between the lips of the poison.
Dion had not the courage of that cowardice, or the cowardice of that
courage. Perhaps, without knowing it, in deciding to live he was only
taking one more step on the road whose beginning he had seen in Elis,
as he waited alone outside of the house where Hermes watched over the
child; was saving the distant Rosamund from a stroke which would pierce
through her armor even though she knelt before the throne of God. But he
was