osterity. Axel's first work had been to make plantations of young
firs and pines wherever the soil was poorest, and when he rode through
the beautiful Kleinwalde forest he endeavoured to extract what pleasure
he could from the thought that in a hundred years Lohm too would have a
forest. But the pleasure to be extracted from this thought was of a
surprisingly subdued quality. All his pleasures were of a subdued
quality. His days were made up of hard work, of that effort to induce
both ends to meet which knocks the savour out of life with such a
singular completeness. He was born with an uncomfortably exact
conception of duty; and now at the end of the best half of his life,
after years of struggling on that poor soil against the odds of that
stern climate, this conception had shaped itself into a fixed belief
that the one thing entirely beautiful, the one thing wholly worthy of a
man's ambition, is the right doing of his duty. So, he thought, shall a
man have peace at the last.

It is a way of thinking common to the educated dwellers in solitary
places, who have not been very successful. Trudi scorned it. "Peace,"
she said, "at the last, is no good at all. What one wants is peace at
the beginning and in the middle. But you only think stuff like that
because you haven't got enough money. Poor people always talk about the
beauty of duty and peace at the last. If somebody left you a fortune
you'd never mention either of them again. Or if you married a girl with
money, now. I wish, I do wish, that _that_ duty would strike you as the
one thing wholly worth doing."

But a man who is all day and every day in his fields, who farms not for
pleasure but for his bare existence, has no time to set out in search of
girls with money, and none came up his way. Besides, he had been engaged
a few years before, and the girl had died, and he had not since had the
least inclination towards matrimony. After that he had worked harder
than ever; and the years flew by, filled with monotonous labour.
Sometimes they were good years, and the ends not only met but lapped
over a little; but generally the bare meeting of the ends was all that
he achieved. His wish was that his brother Gustav who came after him
should find the place in good order; if possible in better order than
before. But the working up of an estate for a brother Gustav, with
whatever determination it may be carried on, is not a labour that evokes
an unflagging enthusiasm in the