But why the building? Why the passing of the countless ages? Why should he not have been born the god he is to be, imbued at birth with all the capabilities his ancestors have died acquiring? Why the Pict and Hun that I may be? Why I, that a descendant of my own, to whom I shall seem a savage, shall come after me? Why, if the universe be ordered by a Creator to whom all things are possible, the protoplasmic cell? Why not the man that is to be? Shall all the generations be so much human waste that he may live? Am I but another layer of the soil preparing for him?
Or, if our future be in other spheres, then why the need of this planet? Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, “Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?” But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living.
ON THE CARE AND MANAGEMENT OF WOMEN
I talked to a woman once on the subject of honeymoons. I said, “Would you recommend a long honeymoon, or a Saturday to Monday somewhere?” A silence fell upon her. I gathered she was looking back rather than forward to her answer.
“I would advise a long honeymoon,” she replied at length, “the old-fashioned month.”
“Why,” I persisted, “I thought the tendency of the age was to cut these things shorter and shorter.”
“It is the tendency of the age,” she answered, “to seek escape from many things it would be wiser to face. I think myself that, for good or evil, the sooner it is over—the sooner both the man and the woman know—the better.”
“The sooner what is over?” I asked.
If she had a fault, this woman, about which I am not sure, it was an inclination towards enigma.
She crossed to the window and stood there, looking out.