no easy accomplishment for me!),
even though in secret I have smiled and pondered.

How our life has been warped by books! We are not contented with
realities: we crave conclusions. With what ardour our minds respond to
real events with literary deductions. Upon a train of incidents, as
unconnected as life itself, we are wont to clap a booky ending. An
instinctive desire for completeness animates the human mind (a struggle
to circumscribe the infinite). We would like to have life "turn
out"--but it doesn't--it doesn't. Each event is the beginning of a whole
new genealogy of events. In boyhood I remember asking after every story
I heard: "What happened next?" for no conclusion ever quite satisfied
me--even when the hero died in his own gore. I always knew there was
something yet remaining to be told. The only sure conclusion we can
reach is this: Life changes. And what is more enthralling to the human
mind than this splendid, boundless, coloured mutability!--life in the
making? How strange it is, then, that we should be contented to take
such small parts of it as we can grasp, and to say, "This is the true
explanation." By such devices we seek to bring infinite existence within
our finite egoistic grasp. We solidify and define where solidification
means loss of interest; and loss of interest, not years, is old age.

So I have mused since my tramp came in for a moment out of the Mystery
(as we all do) and went away again into the Mystery (in our way, too).

There are strange things in this world!

* * * * *

As I came around the corner I saw sitting there on my steps the very
personification of Ruin, a tumble-down, dilapidated wreck of manhood. He
gave one the impression of having been dropped where he sat, all in a
heap. My first instinctive feeling was not one of recoil or even of
hostility, but rather a sudden desire to pick him up and put him where
he belonged, the instinct, I should say, of the normal man who hangs his
axe always on the same nail. When he saw me he gathered himself together
with reluctance and stood fully revealed. It was a curious attitude of
mingled effrontery and apology. "Hit me if you dare," blustered his
outward personality. "For God's sake, don't hit me," cried the innate
fear in his eyes. I stopped and looked at him sharply, His eyes dropped,
his look slid away, so that I experienced a sense of shame, as though I
had trampled upon him. A damp rag of humanity