The result was professional knowledge. Which, however, he had employed rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of the New World. His were essays on the enormous meanness of mankind--mean conditions, mean minds, mean aspirations, and a little mean horizon to encompass all. Out of his theme, patiently, deftly, ingeniously he extracted every atom of that beauty, sanity, inspired imagination which _makes_ the imperfect more perfect, creates _better_ than the materials permit, _forces_ real life actually to assume and _be_ what the passionate desire for sanity and beauty demands. For we become, visibly, what the passionate purpose of the strongest among us demands. Bodies and minds alter in the irresistible demand for beauty and sanity. It is the fixed, inexorable aspiration of the strong that has moved mankind out of its own natal ugliness--so far upon the long, long journey toward sanity, beauty, and the stars. * * * * * The old, old story: beauty is obvious and becomes trite: the corruption from whence it sprung is the only interest. Not the flower but the maggots in the manure which nourishes it; not symmetry, but the causes that deform it; not sanity but the microbes which undermine it. Shadows everywhere framing a black abyss where, deep in obscurity, cause and effect writhe endlessly like two great worms.... And he became uneasy and uncomfortable and perplexed because he seemed to be disinclined to continue work. Eris was interfering. The damp sweetness of her mouth, her cool fresh body, the still clarity of gray eyes, hands that lay in his lightly as dawn-chilled flowers.... Neither intention of mind and pen--nor even effort where, hitherto, inspiration and mechanics had so suavely co-ordinated--seemed to replace him and reassure him in that easy security from whence, hitherto, he had inspected mankind. An indefinable subconsciousness was becoming a restlessness shared by mind and body. And it finally set him adrift from club to avenue--trivial resources of those who depend upon externals for occupation. Never before had Annan been at loss to know how to entertain his mind. He had been an amusing host to himself. Now, for the first time he was aware of a sort of obscure impatience with the entertainment. Not that his was becoming the sordid state of mind of the time-killer--most contemptible of unconscious suicides and slowest of any to enter that meaningless void for which such human phantoms are fitted.