rap about my future position--it can look after itself. I want to
work as you are working, even if I prove a failure. I want to get
something of this off my chest." He laughed. "It's all so difficult
to express, and so easy to see, isn't it? Of course, I know that one
man can't set the wrong in the world right, but each man can do what
his right self advises. Our right self is never wrong."

"Hadassah helped me," Michael Ireton said, "and life has been worth
twice what it was before. I agree with you--we must lead our own lives
according to our own ideals, not according to the world's."

"Most people think me a fool," Michael said, "simply a rotter and a
drifter, just because I can't settle down to work at a career of my
own, while the world's burden is booming in my ear."

"Think things well over," Hadassah said. "Don't rush into plans which
may prove a disappointment. Let your ideas materialize. You are never
really idle--you will be sending thought-waves out into the world; they
will bear fruit. Thought never dies; for good or for evil, it is
everlasting."

"But I have been thinking--or drifting, as Lampton says, just idly
drifting, for what seems to me like ages."

"Drifting closer to the Light," Hadassah said. "It has all been in
order, it has all been a part of the Guiding Power."

"Do you think so? I wish I knew. Lampton thinks I've no ambition. I
have, of a sort, but it's not of a money-making kind, it's not going to
make my name or what you could call a career. I want to teach people
how to live, and I don't know how to do it myself."

"I understand," Ireton said. "There's something out here, in the
simplicity of desert life and the East generally, that lessens our
wants. The fruits of hard labour are not so necessary as in England;
the flesh-pots of Egypt are in the sunshine. If you have just enough
to get along with, here in the East, and have cultivated tastes, life
can be wonderfully beautiful. Poverty need never mean degradation--in
fact, it has its advantages."

"That's it!" Michael Amory said. "I want to let people know how
wonderfully beautiful life can be, even without wealth and worldly
power, and why it is beautiful. I want them to realize the essence of
things, to let those poor, crowded, degraded wretches in London know
the sweetness of work in God's open spaces. I feel that I must do my
little bit in helping things forward. I want to let in a few chinks of
light. .