used to follow with a high head after my own thinking
and my own desires, could not any longer very greatly care for anything.
Now I am changed: for Suskind has made me free once more of the Country
of the Young and of the ageless self-tormenting youth of the gray depths
which maddened Ruric, but did not madden me."

"Look you, Count Manuel, but that penniless young nobody, Ruric the
clerk, was not trapped as you are trapped. For from the faith of others
there is no escape upon this side of the window. World-famous Manuel the
Redeemer has in this place his luck and prosperity to maintain until the
orderings of unimaginative gods have quite destroyed the Manuel that
once followed after his own thinking. For even the high gods here note
with approval that you have become the sort of person in whom the gods
put confidence, and so they favor you unscrupulously. Here all is
pre-arranged for you by the thinking of others. Here there is no escape
for you from acquiring a little more wealth to-day, a little more
meadowland to-morrow, with daily a little more applause and honor and
envy from your fellows, along with always slowly increasing wrinkles and
dulling wits and an augmenting paunch, and with the smug approval of
everybody upon earth and in heaven. That is the reward of those persons
whom you humorously call successful persons."

Dom Manuel answered very slowly, and to little Melicent it seemed that
Father's voice was sad.

Said Manuel: "Certainly, I think there is no escape for me upon this
side of the window of Ageus. A bond was put upon me to make a figure in
this world, and I discharged that obligation. Then came another and yet
another obligation to be discharged. And now has come upon me a geas
which is not to be lifted either by toils or by miracles. It is the geas
which is laid on every person, and the life of every man is as my life,
with no moment free from some bond or another. Heh, youth vaunts
windily, but in the end nobody can follow after his own thinking and his
own desire. At every turn he is confronted by that which is expected,
and obligation follows obligation, and in the long run no champion can
be stronger than everybody. So we succumb to this world's terrible
unreason, willy-nilly, and Helmas has been made wise, and Ferdinand has
been made saintly, and I have been made successful, by that which was
expected of us, and by that which none of us had ever any real chance to
resist in a world wherein