“Well, of course I have no choice. But I can’t promise to be cheerful; that’s impossible.” An obstinate tightening of the grave face.
“I think perhaps I might manage to be serene; generally. I can’t pretend to be cheerful.” ‘Assume an air of cheerfulness, and presently you will be cheerful, in spite of yourself.’ Awful. To live like that would be to miss suddenly finding the hidden something that would make you cheerful for ever.
“Well as I say.”
“You see there’s always the awful question of right and wrong mixed up with everything; all sorts of rights and wrongs, in the simplest things. I can’t think how people can go on so calmly. It sometimes seems to me as if everyone ought to stop and do quite other things. It’s a nightmare, the way things go on. I want to stay here, and yet I often wonder whether I ought; whether I ought to go on doing this kind of work.”
“Well as I say, I know quite well the work here leaves many of your capabilities unoccupied.”
“It’s not that. I mean everything in general.”
“Well—if it is a question of right and wrong, I suppose the life here like any other, offers opportunities for the exercise of the Christian virtues.”
Resignation; virtues deliberately set forth every day like the wares in a little shop; and the world going on outside just the same. A sort of sale of mean little virtues for respectability and a living; the living coming by amiable co-operation with a world where everything was wrong, turning the little virtues into absurdity; respectable absurdity. He did not think the practice of the Christian virtues in a vacuum was enough. But he had made a joke, and smiled his smile.... There was no answer anywhere in the world to the question he had raised. Did he remember saying why shouldn’t you take up dentistry? Soon it would be too late to make any change; there was nothing to do now but to stay and justify things .. it would be impossible to be running about in a surgery with grey hair; it would make the practice seem dowdy. All dental secretaries were young.... The work ... nothing but the life all round it; the existence of a shadow amidst shadows unaware of their shadowiness, keeping going a world where there were things, more than people. The people moved sunlit and prosperous, but not enviable, their secrets revealed at every turn, unaware themselves, they made and left a space in which to be aware....
“I want to say that I think it is kind of you to let me air my grievances so thoroughly.”
“Well, as I say, I feel extremely uncertain as to the advisability of this step.”