That was all he said about her, but before going to bed we talked for hours about his work and prospects. He told me frankly that one of the chief causes of his earlier despondency had been the thought, which he never dared to express in words, that his work was no good. Karelsky's shabby financial dealings with him had increased that fear; he had begun to sink beneath the awful realization that he was a failure. It wasn't any spectacular success that he wanted; he had no envy of those who made their names prominent in the world's view. All he wanted was the secret inward conviction that he was doing something worth doing. And now he had it. "All this may sound priggish," he added, "but I don't think it really _is_ priggish. Because, after all. I'm only choosing the easiest path for myself. I should hate Karelsky's life of fame and sensation, just as he'd hate my life of hard work and insignificance.... We're just made differently, that's all, and we can't help ourselves." "All the same," I said, "you ought to have what you're entitled to, if only to stop others from having more than they're entitled to. You've done the work; you ought to get the credit." "Can't you see that it doesn't matter who gets the credit?" "Frankly," I retorted, "I'm incapable of feeling like that about it. If there's any fame or credit to be got out of my work, I'll be glad to have it. It may be a lower attitude than yours, but it's more appropriate for earning a living in the twentieth century." That seemed to embarrass him. He assured me that he had never reckoned my attitude as 'lower' than his in any way; it was just 'different.' "Yours is medieval," I said, laughingly. "You ought to have been a craftsman on a fourteenth century cathedral, putting your whole life and soul into the carving of a single gargoyle." He said that gargoyles weren't much in his line. "But, anyhow, doing that would be a nobler way of spending a lifetime than lots of the things that are done to-day--selling rubbishy patent medicines, for instance, or writing rubbishy books...." And so we argued, half-seriously, half jocularly, far into the night. One thing rather astonished me--the extent to which he had thought about things. He disliked the modern world, on the whole, and he had his reasons for it. He said that newspapers, modern advertising, and big cities, always afflicted him with a sort of terror. He felt he couldn't 'cope with them.' It was odd, really, his being a scientist, because science was supposed to be the key-note of the new age.... "Sometimes," I said, "I think you aren't a scientist at all, but a theologian gone astray." Oh, no. He wouldn't admit that. He had no sympathy with dogmas. But he did feel that somehow you either had to accept the modern world with an easy cynical fatalism such as Severn's, or else hate it, as he did himself, and long for something warmer and simpler....