end visits to lively
houses, a rush abroad, a few country visits in the winter. Very
harmless and pleasant if one enjoyed it, but to me inconceivable and
insupportable. Perhaps I should be happier and brisker, perhaps the
time would go quicker. Ought one to make up one's mind that this would
be the normal life, and that therefore one had better learn to
accommodate oneself to it? Does one pay penalties for not submitting
oneself to the ordinary laws of human intercourse? Doubtless one does.
But then, made as I am, I should have to pay penalties which would seem
to be even heavier for the submission. It is there that the puzzle
lies; that a man should be created with the strong instinct that I feel
for liberty and independence and solitude and the quiet of the country,
and then that he should discover that the life he so desires should be
the one that develops all the worst side of him--morbidity,
fastidiousness, gloom, discontent. This is the shadow of civilisation;
that it makes people intellectual, alert, craving for stimulus, and yet
sucks their nerves dry of the strength that makes such things enjoyable.

And still, as I go in and out, the death of Alec seems the one
absolutely unintelligible and inexplicable thing, a gloom penetrated by
no star. It was the one thing that might have made me unselfish,
tender-hearted, the anxious care of some other than myself. "Perhaps,"
says an old friend writing to me with a clumsy attempt at comfort,
"perhaps he was taken mercifully away from some evil to come." A good
many people say that, and feel it quite honestly. But what an
insupportable idea of the ways of Providence, that God had planned a
prospect for the child so dreadful that even his swift removal should
be tolerable by comparison! What a helpless, hopeless confession of
failure! No; either the whole short life, closed by the premature
death, must have been designed, planned, executed deliberately; or else
God is at the mercy of blank cross-currents, opposing forces,
tendencies even stronger than Himself; and then the very idea of God
crumbles away, and God becomes the blank and inscrutable force working
behind a gentle, good-humoured will, which would be kind and gracious
if it could, but is trammelled and bound by something stronger; that
was the Greek view, of course--God above man, and Fate above God. The
worst of it is that it has a horrible vraisemblance, and seems to lie
even nearer to the facts of life than ou