“Tell me about yourself,” he said. “What has been going on here?”
“Nothing has been going on. I have been doing a little work—and annoying myself a great deal.”
“Annoying yourself? About what, if I may ask?”
“About my future.”
“Ah!” said the baron. “Does it not please you—your future?”
“As a matter of fact,” answered Selden, with a crooked grin, “I have suddenly discovered that my future is behind me.”
The baron took a long puff of his cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly.
“Your Americanisms sometimes puzzle me,” he said. “What you mean, I suppose, is that you do not at this moment see ahead of you any work which seems as important as that which you have already done.”
“Not at this moment, or any moment. Worse still, I am beginning to despair of human nature; I....”
“But you are wrong—very wrong,” broke in the baron. “Here am I, with at least twice your age, my whole life spent in the most cynical of all professions, and my admiration for human nature grows stronger and stronger, day by day. I listen to the pessimists with a smile—the prophets of evil do not frighten me. I grant all their contentions: that man is naturally evil, that he has used such glimmering light of reason as he may possess only to become more bestial than the beasts, that five thousand years of civilization have culminated in five years of atrocity, fiendishness and insanity; yes, but in the midst of it all, in the very worst of it, there were flashes of splendour—flashes of kindliness, and courage and self-sacrifice. There is something of that in all of us—and that is the miracle. It should not astonish us that men are full of ignorance and vice, but that they are capable of the heroisms they sometimes attain. You have been looking at the wrong side of the shield, my friend.”