"But we weren't. We had, you may say, nothing in common, but we were not afraid of life, and that is the great thing. To me it was wonderful, the experience of courage and curiosity, because I had been brought up to shrink from contact with reality, to keep myself unspotted from the world. It may be, therefore, that I am only describing to you perfectly normal emotions. It may be that I had profited nothing by my long probation. It may be: I cannot tell. I am not a believer in a vicarious existence, living by proxy and tallying each minute, each crisis, by something in a book. Nobody could love literature more than I; but I am sure at the same time that, while life may chance to be literature, literature is not life. It can't be. There was the doctor with his Book of the Dead. Do I judge him? Not I. It may be he was a great genius who will be immortal as we count immortality. To him I was, possibly, a mere annoyance, an impertinent interlude in his entrancing studies of his mouldy mummies, indecorously calling his attention to the existence of a modern effete civilization. I don't know. I never took the trouble to find out. He never materialized again. He moved back into the shadows; a name, tall, pale and with a black beard, passing in his little launch, at the call of the code-flag P. "Well, there it was, a vague and inconclusive episode, like so many others in my life. So many, in fact, that as I look back at it all, if it were not just for Rosa and the children, the sum-total of life for me would be futility. When I read biography, and I have read a good deal of it, I reflect upon the achievements of men, their loves and hates, their steady ambitions hacking away at obstacles until victory is in sight and the guerdon won, or their glorious deaths in action and the fullness of their posthumous fame, and I--I doubt. There is a tinge of theatricality about it all. I doubt. It is not so much that I regret my own failure to copy their example, but rather that the stories don't tally with my own experience. Often, when I tire of a novel, I ask myself why? And the answer is, This isn't the way at all! People aren't _like_ that. Love isn't like that either. While as for hate, there is very little of it in the world, I fancy, but rather ill-temper and selfishness and indifference. These make for futility, just as our uncertainty of ambition does. We grope.