"You are worrying about all this!" she exclaimed.
"Yes, in a way I am worrying," he confessed simply. "Not about the
storm itself. I am ready to face that and I think I shall be a stronger
and a saner man when the battle has started. In the meantime, I think
that what has happened to me is this. I have arrived just at that time
of life when a man takes stock of himself and his doings, criticises his
own past and wonders whether the things he has proposed doing in the
future are worth while."
"You of all men in the world need never ask yourself that," she declared
warmly. "Think of your lifelong devotion to your work. Think of the
idlers by whom you are surrounded."
"I work," he admitted, "but I sometimes ask myself whether I work with
the same motives as I did when I was young. I started life as an
altruist. I am not sure now whether I am not working in self-defence,
from habit, because I am afraid of falling behind."
"You mean that you have lost your ideals?"
"I wonder," he speculated, "whether any man can carry them through to my
age and not be afflicted with doubts as to whether, after all, he has
been on the right path, whether he may not have been worshipping false
gods.
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