victory which he had won, that
he had had no time to think of any other thing; now, after a long
time, in the first moment of inactivity which had fallen to him,
he felt as if waking from sleep, and he was brought to thinking
by the question:

"Well? What is it for?"

Just this question was to him at that moment reality, while every
other thing was accomplished by the power of habit. He had
toiled, calculated, triumphed, just as a round body rolls over an
inclined plane by the force of acquired motion. Under this
surface-life, which had been the one which he had led so long
exclusively, was now another one which seized a continually
increasing area; this new life, a mystery to every other man, had
become for him more tangible than the entire visible universe.
Out of it was growing an irresistible, importunate riddle,
enclosed in the brief words: What for?

These two brief words kept returning to his mind during every
moment of rest, so that hours of noise and movement seemed to him
a dream, and only those two words--unceasingly recurrent--the one
true reality over which there was reason to be anxious.

Why had he taken on his head and hands this new burden of toil,
which was greater than all the others? Why, in general, this
climbing a sky-touching ladder with exertion of all his strength
of nerve and brain? To what kind of heaven could he climb upon
that ladder? New profits, ever-increasing wealth? But he had
ceased to desire these! Although that seemed marvellous to the
man himself, he had ceased really. Why? Did he own little? He was
the possessor of enormously much. He had never been of those who
make a golden chariot so as to sit in it with Bacchantes and with
Bacchus. But pride? He laughed. Yes, pride, but that was before
he had known, intimately, those giants who sit in various corners
of the earth. He knows them now; he knows what they can do; and
he knows his own power. Why toil? What for? But his worth; that
worth which people esteem so immensely that they almost cast
themselves at his feet, or do they cast themselves before his
golden chariot? For, if that chariot were to shoot away from
under him, would he retain the title of modern Cid, Titan,
superhuman? It was wonderful with what clearness he saw then
Maryan, sitting in that chair, and how distinctly he heard his
voice inquiring: "What is the object of your toil, father? The
object; the object? That decides everything. What was the object?
Of cour