atter than love): and if you see the world inventing
poison-gas and falling into its poisoned grave: never give in, but be
alone, and utterly alone with your own soul, in the stillness and
sweet possession of your own soul. And don't even be angry. And
_never_ be sad. Why should you? It's not your affair.

But if your wife should accomplish for herself the sweetness of her
own soul's possession, then gently, delicately let the new mode assert
itself, the new mode of relation between you, with something of
spontaneous paradise in it, the apple of knowledge at last digested.
But, my word, what belly-aches meanwhile. That apple is harder to
digest than a lead gun-cartridge.

CHAPTER XIII

COSMOLOGICAL

Well, dear reader, Chapter XII was short, and I hope you found it
sweet.

But remember, this is an essay on Child Consciousness, not a tract on
Salvation. It isn't my fault that I am led at moments into
exhortation.

Well, then, what about it? One fact now seems very clear--at any rate
to me. We've got to pause. We haven't got to gird our loins with a new
frenzy and our larynxes with a new Glory Song. Not a bit of it. Before
you dash off to put salt on the tail of a new religion or of a new
Leader of Men, dear reader, sit down quietly and pull yourself
together. Say to yourself: "Come now, what is it all about?" And
you'll realize, dear reader, that you're all in a fluster, inwardly.
Then say to yourself: "Why am I in such a fluster?" And you'll see
you've no reason at all to be so: except that it's rather exciting to
be in a fluster, and it may seem rather stale eggs to be in no fluster
at all about anything. And yet, dear little reader, once you consider
it quietly, it's _so_ much nicer _not_ to be in a fluster. It's so
much nicer not to feel one's deeper innards storming like the Bay of
Biscay. It is so much better to get up and say to the waters of one's
own troubled spirit: Peace, be still ...! And they will be still ...
perhaps.

And then one realizes that all the wild storms of anxiety and frenzy
were only so much breaking of eggs. It isn't our business to live
anybody's life, or to die anybody's death, except our own. Nor to save
anybody's soul, nor to put anybody in the right; nor yet in the wrong,
which is more the point to-day. But to be still, and to ignore the
false fine frenzy of the seething world. To turn away, now, each one
into the stillness and solitude of his own soul. And there to remai