ing in
the lake, hunting, but careful not to overtax my returning strength. I
was not in love with life, far from it! But I had no intention of adding
invalidism to my other disintegrations. In the evening I played cards
with my secretary or practised at the piano, with some revival of my old
interest in music. I read little, even in the newspapers. I was become,
save perhaps for my music, an automaton. But, although I did not improve
in appearance, my health was completely restored, and when the war came I
was in perfect condition for the arduous task I immediately undertook.
Moreover, my mind, torpid for a year, was free and refreshed for those
practical details it must grapple with at once. I turned the Zattiany
palace in Buda Pesth into a hospital. And then for four years I was
again an automaton, but this time a necessary and useful one. When I
thought about myself at all, it seemed to me that this selfless and
strenuous interval was the final severance from my old life. If Society
in Europe today were miraculously restored to its pre-war
brilliancy--indifferent to little but excitement and pleasure--there
would be nothing in it for me.

"Now I come to the miracle." And while she recapitulated what she had
told the women at Mrs. Oglethorpe's luncheon, Clavering listened without
chaos in his accompanying thoughts. "Certainly, man's span is too brief
now," she concluded. "He withers and dies at an age when, if he has
lived sanely--and when a man abuses his natural functions he generally
dies before old age, anyhow--he is beginning to see life as a whole, with
that detachment that comes when his personal hold on life and affairs is
relaxing, when he has realized his mistakes, and has attained a mental
and moral orientation which could be of inestimable service to his fellow
men, and to civilization in general. What you call crankiness in old
people, so trying to the younger generations, does not arise from natural
hatefulness of disposition and a released congenital selfishness, but
from atrophying glands, and, no doubt, a subtle rebellion against nature
for consigning men to ineptitude when they should be entering upon their
best period of usefulness, and philosophical as well as active enjoyment
of life.

"Science has defeated nature at many points. The isolation of germs, the
discovery of toxins and serums, the triumph over diseases that once
wasted whole nations and brought about the fall of empire