th retailing his ailments."

"No. No. Go on."

"I began to think now that what took the go out of me as my work went
on was the lack of any real fellowship in what I was doing. It was the
pressure of the opposition in the Committee, day afterday. It was being
up against men who didn't reason against me but who just showed by
everything they did that the things I wanted to achieve didn't matter
to them one rap. It was going back to a home, lunching in clubs, reading
papers, going about a world in which all the organization, all the
possibility of the organization I dream of is tacitly denied. I don't
know if it seems an extraordinary confession of weakness to you,
but that steady refusal of the majority of my Committee to come into
co-operation with me has beaten me--or at any rate has come very near to
beating me. Most of them you know are such able men. You can FEEL their
knowledge and commonsense. They, and everybody about me, seemed busy and
intent upon more immediate things, that seemed more real to them than
this remote, theoretical, PRIGGISH end I have set for myself...."

He paused.

"Go on," said Miss Grammont. "I think I understand this."

"And yet I know I am right."

"I know you are right. I'm certain. Go on.

"If one of those ten thousand members of the Sokol Society had thrown
back his brown cloak and shown red when all the others still kept them
selves cloaked--if he was a normal sensitive man--he might have felt
something of a fool. He might have felt premature and presumptuous. Red
he was and the others he knew were red also, but why show it? That is
the peculiar distress of people like ourselves, who have some sense
of history and some sense of a larger life within us than our merely
personal life. We don't want to go on with the old story merely. We want
to live somehow in that larger life and to live for its greater ends and
lose something unbearable of ourselves, and in wanting to do that we are
only wanting to do what nearly everybody perhaps is ripe to do and will
presently want to do. When the New Age Martineau talks about begins to
come it may come very quickly--as the red came at Prague. But for the
present everyone hesitates about throwing back the cloak."

"Until the cloak becomes unbearable," she said, repeating his word.

"I came upon this holiday in the queerest state. I thought I was ill.
I thought I was overworked. But the real trouble was a loneliness that
robbed me of all driv