"Well, it will only mean that I have been run over by a motor-car, or got cancer, or something of the sort, or that you have. If we are still in control of ourselves we'll do it. I wonder if those two cigarettes will be mouldy or pickled with brine by that time?"
"Kippered or mouldy or pickled, I will smoke one of them on the day you return," said he.
"And I the other. But I hope it won't be mouldy. Or I shall be sick," said I.
"Likely. Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to sit on a rock all wet in the blaze of the sun! I wonder if it's all too pleasant—whether Nemesis has her wooden eye on me? Oh, Mother Nemesis, beautiful, kind Lady Nemesis, remove your wooden eye from me! Your wooden eye offends me; pluck it out and cast it from thee! I don't do much harm; I sit in the sea and eat my food, and have a tremendous quantity of great ideas, none of which ever come to anything."
"You might be called lazy, you know," said I. "Lady Nemesis would explain that to you before she beat you."
"I might be called whatever you choose to call me," said he, "but it need not be applicable. I'm not lazy; my brain is an exceedingly busy one, though it doesn't devote itself to the orthodox pursuits of losing money in the city and labelling yourself a financier, or playing bridge in a country town and labelling yourself a soldier, or writing a lot of weary stories and calling yourself an author."
"I never did," said I hastily.
"Well, you permit other people to do so, if you will put on the cap like that. Don't rag, or I shall push you into the sea. I was saying that I was not lazy, because I think. Most people imagine that energy must be spent in action, and they will tell you quite erroneously (as you did just now) that if you don't sit in an office, or something of that kind, or do something, that you are indolent. The reason is that most people can't think, and so when they cease from acting they are unemployed. But people who can think are never so busy as when they cease from action. Most people are beavers; they build a dam, in which they shut up their souls. And they call it civilization. The world as pictured by such Progressionists will be an awful place. There will be wonderful drainage, and milk for children, and capsuled food, and inoculation against all diseases, and plenty of peace and comfort for everybody, and a chromolithograph of Mr. H. G. Wells on every wall. Then the millennium will come, the great vegetable millennium, in which the whole human race will stretch from world's end to world's end like rows of cabbages, each in his own place in straight lines, and all seated on the ground, as the hymn says. Why, the whole glory of the human race is that we're not content, not happy, missing something always, yearning for something that eludes us and glorifies our search...."
He paused a moment, and drew the thermometer out of the water.
"It's an affair of conscience," he said; "I do what my conscience tells me is of most importance."