ortality with it, they will hail us
as the saviours of humanity."

"Mr. Herbert Wain did not seem to accept the idea of immortality with
any pleasure," I muttered. "The suggestion seemed to strike him as
terrible."

Sarakoff laughed genially.

"My friend," he said, "Mr. Herbert Wain is not a man of vision. He is a
cockney, brought up in the streets of a callous city. To him life is a
hard struggle, and immortality naturally appears in a poor light. You
must have patience. It will take some time before the significance of
this immortality is grasped by the people. But when it is grasped, all
the conditions of life will change. Life will become beautiful. We will
have reforms that, under ordinary circumstances, would have taken
countless ages to bring about. We will anticipate our evolution by
thousands of centuries. At one step we will reach the ultimate goal of
our destiny."

"And what is that?"

"Immortality, of course. Surely you must see by now that all the
activities of modern life are really directed towards one end--towards
solving the riddle of prolonging life and at the same time increasing
pleasure? Isn't that the inner secret desire that you doctors find in
every patient? So far a compromise has only been possible, but now that
is all changed."

"I don't agree, Sarakoff. Some people must live for other motives. Take
myself ... I live for science."

"It is merely your form of pleasure."

"That's a quibble," I cried angrily. "Science is aspiration. There's all
the difference in the world between aspiration and pleasure. I have
scarcely known what pleasure is. I have worked like a slave all my life,
with the sole ambition of leaving something permanent behind me when I
die."

"But you won't die," interposed the Russian. "That is the charm of the
new situation."

"Then why should I work?" The question shaped itself in my mind and I
uttered it involuntarily. I sat down and stared at the fire. A kind of
dull depression came over me, and for some reason the picture of
Sarakoff's butterflies appeared in my mind. I saw them with great
distinctness, crawling aimlessly on the floor of their cage. "Why should
I work?" I repeated.

Sarakoff merely shrugged his shoulders and turned away. Questions of
that kind did not seem to bother him. His was a nature that escaped the
necessity of self-analysis. But I was different, and our conversation
had aroused a train of odd thought. What, after all, was it that kept