ing in a saloon for the second half.
He had been sculling madly for the first half of the afternoon
and thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half.
He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a debating
club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy
Smith was melancholy still. Then, as he was going home to his
diggings he remembered the eccentricity of his friend and master,
the Warden of Brakespeare, and resolved desperately to turn
in to that gentleman's private house.

"Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne
in philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence;
the university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover,
a don has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough
to make them a part of the British Constitution. The bad habits
of Emerson Eames were to sit up all night and to be a student
of Schopenhauer. Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man,
with a blond pointed beard, not so very much older than his
pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but older by centuries
in the two essential respects of having a European reputation
and a bald head.

"`I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,' said Smith, who was
nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself small,
`because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really too rotten.
I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think otherwise--bishops,
and agnostics, and those sort of people. And knowing you were the greatest
living authority on the pessimist thinkers--'

"`All thinkers,' said Eames, `are pessimist thinkers.'

"After a patch of pause, not the first--for this depressing conversation
had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and silence--
the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy: `It's all a question
of wrong calculation. The moth flies into the candle because he doesn't
happen to know that the game is not worth the candle. The wasp gets
into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam into him.
IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they want
to enjoy gin--because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too big
a price for it. That they never find happiness--that they don't even know
how to look for it--is proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness
of everything they do. Their discordant colours are cries of pain.
Look at the brick v