I?

"Well, why not?" I echoed.

"That's what I want you to tell me," he returned. "You set up for
understanding human nature, it's a mystery to me. In my place, you
would do as I do; you know that. If somebody left you a hundred thousand
pounds to-morrow, you would start a newspaper, or build a theatre--some
damn-fool trick for getting rid of the money and giving yourself
seventeen hours' anxiety a day; you know you would."

I hung my head in shame. I felt the justice of the accusation. It has
always been my dream to run a newspaper and own a theatre.

"If we worked only for what we could spend," he went on, "the City might
put up its shutters to-morrow morning. What I want to get at the bottom
of is this instinct that drives us to work apparently for work's own
sake. What is this strange thing that gets upon our back and spurs us?"

A servant entered at that moment with a cablegram from the manager of
one of his Austrian mines, and he had to leave me for his study. But,
walking home, I fell to pondering on his words. WHY this endless work?
Why each morning do we get up and wash and dress ourselves, to undress
ourselves at night and go to bed again? Why do we work merely to earn
money to buy food; and eat food so as to gain strength that we may work?
Why do we live, merely in the end to say good-bye to one another? Why
do we labour to bring children into the world that they may die and be
buried?

Of what use our mad striving, our passionate desire? Will it matter
to the ages whether, once upon a time, the Union Jack or the Tricolour
floated over the battlements of Badajoz? Yet we poured our blood into
its ditches to decide the question. Will it matter, in the days when the
glacial period shall have come again, to clothe the earth with silence,
whose foot first trod the Pole? Yet, generation after generation, we
mile its roadway with our whitening bones. So very soon the worms come
to us; does it matter whether we love, or hate? Yet the hot blood rushes
through our veins, we wear out heart and brain for shadowy hopes that
ever fade as we press forward.

The flower struggles up from seed-pod, draws the sweet sap from the
ground, folds its petals each night, and sleeps. Then love comes to it
in a strange form, and it longs to mingle its pollen with the pollen of
some other flower. So it puts forth its gay blossoms, and the wandering
insect bears the message from seed-pod to seed-pod. And the seasons
pass, bringin