"You're extraordinarily old-fashioned, Raney."
"If to be grateful is to be old-fashioned." He leant back and gazed at the ceiling. "I think it's a workable philosophy. There are people who can do things I can't do, and there are people who can't do the things I can. It's a long scale—strong, less strong, weak, more weak. If every man helped the man below him.... You fellows would say I'm superstitious. I dare say. If you're the one man to come out of an earthquake alive, you start believing in a special providence.... I've been helped a bit—and I've once or twice helped another man. Whenever I could, in fact. And from the depths of my soul I believe if I said 'no' when I was asked...." He shrugged his shoulders and left the sentence unfinished.
"Well, go on!" It was Loring who spoke, not without interest. "What would happen?"
"I should be damned out of hand. I don't mean a bolt from heaven, but I ... I should never be able to do anything again. I should be hamstrung."
"Black superstition," was Loring's comment.
"Not a bit of it! There's a fear of subjective damnation far more vigorous than the outer darkness and worm-that-dies-not nonsense."
"You're on too high a plane for dinner," said Loring. "You should cultivate the pleonectic side of life. I've had two roes on toast, and I'm going to have a third."
VI
Never have I known time pass so quickly as during that last year. Early in the Michaelmas term both Loring and I developed acute 'Schools-panic'; we barred ourselves inside '93D' and read ten hours a day, planning retreats in Cornwall for the vac., when we were to rise at dawn, bathe in the sea and work in four shifts of four hours each. The cottage was almost taken when a revulsion of feeling led us to adopt an attitude of melancholy fatalism. We said—what was true enough—that life under such conditions was not worth living; we added—what was less true—that we did not care whether we got firsts or fourths.
Gradually the door of '93D' was unbarred. We dined in Hall once or twice a week and attended clubs to eat dessert for which—as we were out of College—other people paid. The men of our year had by this time been infected with our own morbid state of conscience, but there were still happy second-year men without a care in the world, and freshmen who—so far as I could see—were living solely for pleasure.