t and kicked off his boots.
When he had lighted a pipe he threw himself on the old sofa which had
done duty as couch at the foot of his bed ever since he was a boy. It
was the attitude in which he had always been best able to "think things
out."

Now that he had eaten a sufficient dinner, he felt physically less
bruised, though mentally there was more to torture him. He regretted
having seen Uncle Sim. He hated the alternative of letting things alone.
There was a sense in which action would have been an anodyne to
suffering, and had it not been for Uncle Sim he would have had no
scruple in making use of it.

It was all very well to talk of letting people settle their own affairs;
but how _could_ they settle them, in these particular cases, without his
intervention? As far as power went he was like a fairy prince who had
only to wave a wand to see the whole scene transfigured. If he hadn't
asked Uncle Sim's advice he would be already waving it, instead of
lolling on his back, with his right foot poised over his left knee and
dangling a heelless slipper in the air. He felt shame at the very
attitude of idleness.

True, there were the two distinct lines of action--that of making a
number of people happy now, and that of holding back that they might
fight their own battles. By fighting their own battles they might emerge
from the conflict the stronger--after forty or fifty years! Those who
were unlikely to live so long--Len and Bessie Willoughby, for
example--would probably go down rebelling and protesting to their
graves. But Claude and Rosie and Lois might all grow morally the
stronger. There was that possibility. It was plain. Claude and Rosie
might marry on the former's fifteen hundred dollars a year, have
children, and bring them up in poverty as model citizens; but whatever
the high triumph of their middle age, Thor shrank from the thought of
the interval for both. And Lois, too, might live down grief,
disappointment, small means, and loneliness; might become hardened and
toughened and beaten to endurance, and grow to be the best and bravest
and kindest old maid in the world. Uncle Sim would probably consider
that in these noble achievements the game would be worth the candle; but
he, Thor Masterman, didn't. The more he developed the possibilities of
this future for every one concerned, himself included, the more he
loathed it.

It was past eleven before he reached the point of loathing at which he
was convinced