y are
the true atheists.

One of the things that struck him about the city was its heedlessness of
Time. On every side he saw people spending it without adequate return.
Perhaps he was young and doctrinaire: but he devised this theory for
himself--all time is wasted that does not give you some awareness of
beauty or wonder. In other words, "the days that make us happy make us
wise," he said to himself, quoting Masefield's line. On that principle,
he asked, how much time is wasted in this city? Well, here are some six
million people. To simplify the problem (which is permitted to every
philosopher) let us (he said) assume that 2,350,000 of those people have
spent a day that could be called, on the whole, happy: a day in
which they have had glimpses of reality; a day in which they feel
satisfaction. (That was, he felt, a generous allowance. ) Very well,
then, that leaves 3,650,000 people whose day has been unfruitful: spent
in uncongenial work, or in sorrow, suffering, and talking nonsense. This
city, then, in one day, has wasted 10,000 years, or 100 centuries. One
hundred centuries squandered in a day! It made him feel quite ill, and
he tore up the scrap of paper on which he had been figuring.

This was a new, disconcerting way to think of the subject. We are
accustomed to consider Time only as it applies to ourselves, forgetting
that it is working upon everyone else simultaneously. Why, he thought
with a sudden shock, if only 36,500 people in this city have had a
thoroughly spendthrift and useless day, that means a net loss of a
century! If the War, he said to himself, lasted over 1,500 days and
involved more than 10,000,000 men, how many aeons--He used to think
about these things during quiet evenings in the top-floor room at Mrs.
Purp's. Occasionally he went home at night still wearing his store
clothes, because it pleased good Mrs. Purp so much. She felt that it
added glamour to her house to have him do so, and always called her
husband, a frightened silent creature with no collar and a humble air,
up from the basement to admire. Mr. Purp's time, Gissing suspected,
was irretrievably wasted--a good deal of it, to judge by his dusty
appearance, in rolling around in ashcans or in the company of the
neighbourhood bootlegger; but then, he reflected, in a charitable
seizure, you must not judge other people's time-spendings by a calculus
of your own.

Perhaps he himself was growing a little miserly in this matter.
Indul