it to you, these things puzzle me, Ponderevo. They dishearten me. They
keep me in bed."

He had an air of having saved up these difficulties for me for some
time. He sat with his chin almost touching his knees, sucking at his
pipe.

"That's what I mean," he went on, "when I say life is getting on to me
as extraordinarily queer, I don't see my game, nor why I was invited.
And I don't make anything of the world outside either. What do you make
of it?"

"London," I began. "It's--so enormous!"

"Isn't it! And it's all up to nothing. You find chaps keeping grocers'
shops--why the DEVIL, Ponderevo, do they keep grocers' shops? They
all do it very carefully, very steadily, very meanly. You find people
running about and doing the most remarkable things being policemen, for
example, and burglars. They go about these businesses quite gravely and
earnestly. I somehow--can't go about mine. Is there any sense in it at
all--anywhere?"

"There must be sense in it," I said. "We're young."

"We're young--yes. But one must inquire. The grocer's a grocer because,
I suppose, he sees he comes in there. Feels that on the whole it amounts
to a call.... But the bother is I don't see where I come in at all. Do
you?"

"Where you come in?"

"No, where you come in."

"Not exactly, yet," I said. "I want to do some good in the
world--something--something effectual, before I die. I have a sort of
idea my scientific work--I don't know."

"Yes," he mused. "And I've got a sort of idea my sculpture,--but now it
is to come in and WHY,--I've no idea at all." He hugged his knees for a
space. "That's what puzzles me, Ponderevo, no end."

He became animated. "If you will look in that cupboard," he said,
"you will find an old respectable looking roll on a plate and a knife
somewhere and a gallipot containing butter. You give them me and I'll
make my breakfast, and then if you don't mind watching me paddle about
at my simple toilet I'll get up. Then we'll go for a walk and talk about
this affair of life further. And about Art and Literature and anything
else that crops up on the way.... Yes, that's the gallipot. Cockroach
got in it? Chuck him out--damned interloper...."

So in the first five minutes of our talk, as I seem to remember it
now, old Ewart struck the note that ran through all that morning's
intercourse....

To me it was a most memorable talk because it opened out quite new
horizons of thought. I'd been working rather close and ou