More and more it seemed to him clear that the one way to be of use in this odd world--of the oddity of the world he was becoming increasingly convinced, comparing it with the many worlds he could more easily have imagined--the one way, it seemed, to be of use was to take a definite line and stick to it and reject all others; to be single-minded and ardent, and exclusive; to be, in brief, a partisan, if necessary a bigot. In procession there moved before him the fine, strong, ardent people he had known, who had spent themselves for an idea, and for its inherent negations, and he saw them all as martyrs; Eileen, living on broken and dead because so utter had been her caring for one person that no one else was any good; Molly, cutting two lives apart for a difference of principle; Billy Raymond, Jane Dawn, all the company of craftsmen and artists, fining words and lines to their utmost, fastidiously rejecting, laying down insuperable barriers between good and bad, so that never the twain should meet; priests and all moral reformers, working against odds for these same barriers in a different sphere; all workers, all artists, all healers of evil, all makers of good; even Daphne and Nevill, parted for principles that could not join; and Arnold, dead for a cause. Only the aimless drifters, the ineptitudes, content to slope through the world on thoughts, were left outside the workshop unused. In these dark hours of self-disgust, Eddy half thought of becoming a novelist, that last resource of the spiritually destitute. For novels are not life, that immeasurably important thing that has to be so sternly approached; in novels one may take as many points of view as one likes, all at the same time; instead of working for life, one may sit and survey it from all angles simultaneously. It is only when one starts walking on a road that one finds it excludes the other roads. Yes; probably he would end a novelist. An ignoble, perhaps even a fatuous career; but it is, after all, one way through this queer, shifting chaos of unanswerable riddles. When solutions are proved unattainable, some spend themselves and their all on a rough-and-ready shot at truth, on doing what they can with the little they know; others give it up and talk about it. It was as a refuge for such as these that the novelist’s trade was presented to man, we will not speculate from whence or by whom.... Breaking into these dark reflections came friends to see him, dropping in one by one. The first was Professor Denison, the morning after the accident. A telegram had brought him up from Cambridge, late last night. Seeing his grey, stricken face, Eddy felt miserably disloyal, to have come out of it alive. Dr. Denison patted him on the shoulder and said, “Poor boy, poor boy. It is hard for you,” and it was Eddy who had tears in his eyes. “I took him there,” he muttered; but Dr. Denison took no notice of that.