our childish superstitions and optimisms shall have been
burned away."

Some faith indeed had given him strength to renounce those things in
life I had held dear, driven him on to fight until his exhausted body
failed him, and even now that he was physically helpless sustained him.
I did not ask myself, then, the nature of this faith. In its presence it
could no more be questioned than the light. It was light; I felt bathed
in it. Now it was soft, suffused: but I remembered how the night before
in the hall, just before he had fallen, it had flashed forth in a smile
and illumined my soul with an ecstasy that yet was anguish....

"We shall get back," I said at length. My remark was not a question--it
had escaped from me almost unawares.

"The joy is in the journey," he answered. "The secret is in the search."

"But for me?" I exclaimed.

"We've all been lost, Paret. It would seem as though we have to be."

"And yet you are--saved," I said, hesitating over the word.

"It is true that I am content, even happy," he asserted, "in spite of my
wish to live. If there is any secret, it lies, I think, in the struggle
for an open mind, in the keeping alive of a desire to know more and
more. That desire, strangely enough, hasn't lost its strength. We don't
know whether there is a future life, but if there is, I think it must
be a continuation of this." He paused. "I told you I was glad you came
in--I've been thinking of you, and I saw you in the hall last night. You
ask what there is for you--I'll tell you,--the new generation."

"The new generation."

"That's the task of every man and woman who wakes up. I've come to see
how little can be done for the great majority of those who have reached
our age. It's hard--but it's true. Superstition, sentiment, the habit
of wrong thinking or of not thinking at all have struck in too deep, the
habit of unreasoning acceptance of authority is too paralyzing. Some may
be stung back into life, spurred on to find out what the world really
is, but not many. The hope lies in those who are coming after us--we
must do for them what wasn't done for us. We really didn't have much of
a chance, Paret. What did our instructors at Harvard know about the age
that was dawning? what did anybody know? You can educate yourself--or
rather reeducate yourself. All this"--and he waved his hand towards his
bookshelves--"all this has sprung up since you and I were at Cambridge;
if we don't try to become famili