"I've got into this stupid struggle for winning money," he went on, "and I feel like a woman must feel who's made a success of prostitution. I've been prostituted. I feel like some one fallen and diseased.... Business and prostitution; they're the same thing. All business is a sort of prostitution, all prostitution is a sort of business. Why should one sell one's brains any more than one sells one's body?... It's so easy to succeed if one has good brains and cares to do it, and doesn't let one's attention or imagination wander--and it's so degrading. Hopelessly degrading.... I'm sick of this life, Marjorie. _I_ don't want to buy things. I'm sick of buying. I'm at an end. I'm clean at an end. It's exactly as though suddenly in walking through a great house one came on a passage that ended abruptly in a door, which opened--on nothing! Nothing!" "This is a mood," she whispered to his pause. "It isn't a mood, it's a fact.... I've got nothing ahead, and I don't know how to get back. My life's no good to me any more. I've spent myself." She looked at him with dismayed eyes. "But," she said, "this _is_ a mood." "No," he said, "no mood, but conviction. I _know_...." He started. The car had stopped at their house, and Malcolm was opening the door of the car. They descended silently, and went upstairs in silence. He came into her room presently and sat down by her fireside. She had gone to her dressing-table and unfastened a necklace; now with this winking and glittering in her hand she came and stood beside him. "Rag," she said, "I don't know what to say. This isn't so much of a surprise.... I _felt_ that somehow life was disappointing you, that I was disappointing you. I've felt it endless times, but more so lately. I haven't perhaps dared to let myself know just how much.... But isn't it what life is? Doesn't every wife disappoint her husband? We're none of us inexhaustible. After all, we've had a good time; isn't it a little ungrateful to forget?..." "Look here, Rag," she said. "I don't know what to do. If I did know, I would do it.... What are we to do?" "Think," he suggested. "We've got to live as well as think." "It's the immense troublesome futility of--everything," he said. "Well--let us cease to be futile. Let us _do_. You say there is no grip for you in research, that you despise politics.... There's no end of trouble and suffering. Cannot we do social work, social reform, change the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves...." "Who are we that we should tamper with the lives of others?" "But one must do something." He thought that over. "No," he said "that's the universal blunder nowadays. One must do the right thing. And we don't know the right thing, Marjorie. That's the very heart of the trouble.... Does this life satisfy _you?_ If it did would you always be so restless?..." "But," she said, "think of the good things in life?"