s driven by the wind. Where it blindly
drives, there we blindly go. So it has been from the beginning. So it
always will be. In the last twenty-four hours there are many things I
have ceased to believe in, and among them, my dear mother, is human
responsibility."

He paused, and motioned Lady Calmady towards her chair with a certain
authority.

"Therefore calm yourself," he said. "Grieve as little as may be about
all this matter, and let us talk it over without further emotion."

He waited a brief space, giving her time to recover her composure, and
then continued coldly, with a careful abstention from any show of
feeling.

"Let us clear our minds of cant, and go forward knowing that there is
really neither good nor evil. For these--even as God Himself, whose
existence I treated from the anthro-pomorphic standpoint just now, so
as to supply myself with a target to shoot at, a windmill at which to
tilt, a row of ninepins set up for the mere satisfaction of knocking
them down again--these are plausible delusions invented by man, in the
vain effort to protect himself and his fellows from the profound sense
of loneliness, and impotence, which seizes on him if he catches so much
as a passing glimpse of the gross comedy of human aspiration, human
affection, briefly, human existence."

But, strive as he might, excitement gained on Richard once more, for
young blood is hot and gallops masterfully along the veins, specially
under the whip of real or imagined disgrace. He sat upright, grasping
the arms of his chair, and looking, not at his mother, but away into
the deep of the summer night.

"Perhaps my personal peculiarities confer on me unusually acute
perception of the inherent grossness of the human comedy. I propose to
take the lesson to heart. They teach me not to sacrifice the present to
the future, but to fling away ideals like so much waste paper, and just
take that which I can immediately get. They tell me to limit my
horizon, and go the common way of common, coarse-grained, sensual
man--in as far as that way is possible to me--and be of this world
worldly. And so, mother, I want you to understand that from this day
forth I turn over a new leaf, not only in thought, but in conduct. I am
going to have just all that my money and position, and even this vile
deformity--for, by God, I'll use that too--what people won't give for
love they'll give for curiosity--can bring me of pleasure and
notoriety. I am going to la