Sir Sedley Beaudesert had never married. Whatever his years, he was still young enough in looks to be married for love. He was high-born, he was rich; he was, as I have said, popular; yet on his fair features there was an expression of melancholy; and on that forehead—pure from the lines of ambition, and free from the weight of study—there was the shadow of unmistakeable regret. “I don’t know that,” said my father; “I have never yet found in life one man who made happiness his end and aim. One wants to gain a fortune, another to spend it—one to get a place, another to build a name; but they all know very well that it is not happiness they search for. No Utilitarian was ever actuated by self-interest, poor man, when he sate down to scribble his unpopular crochets to prove self-interest universal. And as to that notable distinction—between self-interest vulgar and self-interest enlightened—the more the self-interest is enlightened, the less we are influenced by it. If you tell the young man who has just written a fine book or made a fine speech, that he will not be any happier if he attains to the fame of Milton, or the power of Pitt, and that, for the sake of his own happiness, he had much better cultivate a farm, live in the country, and postpone to the last the days of dyspepsia and gout, he will answer you fairly,—‘I am quite as sensible of that as you are. But I am not thinking whether or not I shall be happy. I have made up my mind to be, if I can, a great author or a prime minister.’ So it is with all the active sons of the world. To push on is the law of nature. And you can no more say to men and to nations than to children,—‘Sit still, and don’t wear out your shoes!’” “Then,” said Trevanion, “if I tell you I am not happy, your only answer is, that I obey an inevitable law.” “No! I don’t say that it is an inevitable law that man should not be happy; but it is an inevitable law that a man, in spite of himself, should live for something higher than his own happiness. He cannot live in himself or for himself, however egotistical he may try to be. Every desire he has links him with others. Man is not a machine—he is a part of one.” “True, brother, he is a soldier, not an army,” said Captain Roland. “Life is a drama, not a monologue,” pursued my father. “Drama is derived from a Greek verb, signifying _to do_. Every actor in the drama has something to do, which helps on the progress of the whole: that is the object for which the Author created him. Do your part, and let the Great Play get on.” “Ah!” said Trevanion briskly, “but to do the part is the difficulty! Every actor helps to the catastrophe, and yet must do his part without knowing how all is to end. Shall he help the curtain to fall on a tragedy or a comedy? Come, I will tell you the one secret of my public life—that which explains all its failure (for, in spite of my position, I have failed) and its regrets—_I want conviction!_”