"Nine-tenths of us are condemned to it. My father was a minister up in Galloway. A real hell-fire man he was, but he died of a consumption, hell-fire being nothing against the mists of the place he lived in. Several men from our glen, my uncles among them, had gone to England and made money. They said it was easy, so I came down the first. I had a head stuffed full of poetry and the Bible and Scots righteousness--you need to be a Scot to know what that means--and for years I was desperately lonely. Two of my brothers followed me. They did well, as they call it. They made money and saved and saved, and made more money. They both married rich women. I got lonelier and lonelier, and more and more caught up in the trick of watching myself. I lived with my mother for years. I married to get away from her, and it was an awful day for the woman that married me. I could not let her in to me. . . . Can you make anything of that? You're a younger man than I am. Can you make anything of that? I'm an old white-bearded sinner, and if all my life was to be written they'd say it was an awful tragedy. But it isn't that. It's a fool's comedy. There's no tragedy save in a strong man who can put up a fight against his own weakness. Men like me, and that's most of us, waste our lives in fighting against our own strength. Oh! I tell you there's many a thing a man thinks of in his loneliness, but it's all thought, thought, thought; it never grows into action. One thing a man realises pretty quickly, and that is that there is nothing wrong with the world except the monstrous egoism of men and women. It is easy to realise but almost impossible to fight against. All along the line we refuse to accept the laws and principles that govern the universe because they are so little flattering to our precious vanity. We make laws against nature, organise ourselves into churches or states and nations against her, invent trumpery codes of morality in the blind hope of cheating her. From generation to generation it is one long wasteful and pitifully vain struggle against nature. . . . Look at the result. Look at the places we live in. Look at what we call society. Why we haven't even devised any method of insuring that every man and every woman shall have the bare necessaries of life; in thousands of years we haven't learned to contrive that civilisation shall give the majority of men greater comfort and happiness than they can find in barbarism. We've tried this game of civilisation over and over again, but we have never got beyond the most stupid materialism. You can almost count the really civilised men--men who have been masters of life and lived it at all points and enriched it for all those with whom they came in contact--on two hands. The rest of us are caught up by the habit of loneliness, and we are prisoners all our lives. I know. I don't give a brass farthing for material success or failure. I know the bitterness of spiritual failure.