itanism. That was a dreadful plague, the brutes
held and taught that joy and laughter and merriment were evil: it was a
doctrine the most profane and wicked. Why, what is the commonest crime
one sees? A sullen face. That is the truth of the matter.

"Now all my life I have believed that we are intended to be happy, that
joy is of all gifts the most divine. And when I left London, abandoned
my career, such as it was, I did so because I intended to devote my life
to the cultivation of joy, and, by continuous and unsparing effort, to
be happy. Among people, and in constant intercourse with others, I did
not find it possible; there were too many distractions in towns and
work-rooms, and also too much suffering. So I took one step backwards or
forwards, as you may choose to put it, and went straight to Nature, to
trees, birds, animals, to all those things which quite clearly pursue
one aim only, which blindly follow the great native instinct to be
happy without any care at all for morality, or human law or divine law.
I wanted, you understand, to get all joy first-hand and unadulterated,
and I think it scarcely exists among men; it is obsolete."

Darcy turned in his chair.

"Ah, but what makes birds and animals happy?" he asked. "Food, food and
mating."

Frank laughed gently in the stillness.

"Do not think I became a sensualist," he said. "I did not make that
mistake. For the sensualist carries his miseries pick-a-back, and round
his feet is wound the shroud that shall soon enwrap him. I may be mad,
it is true, but I am not so stupid anyhow as to have tried that. No,
what is it that makes puppies play with their own tails, that sends cats
on their prowling ecstatic errands at night?".

He paused a moment.

"So I went to Nature," he said. "I sat down here in this New Forest,
sat down fair and square, and looked. That was my first difficulty, to
sit here quiet without being bored, to wait without being impatient, to
be receptive and very alert, though for a long time nothing particular
happened. The change in fact was slow in those early stages."

"Nothing happened?" asked Darcy rather impatiently, with the sturdy
revolt against any new idea which to the English mind is synonymous with
nonsense. "Why, what in the world _should_ happen?"

Now Frank as he had known him was the most generous but most
quick-tempered of mortal men; in other words his anger would flare to a
prodigious beacon, under almost no provocation,