"Oh," he cried out with sudden vehemence, waving his palette with a gesture of supreme impatience, "I do take a desperate view! Life is desperate, and the most absurd of all the multitudinous ways of making it worse is to waste the present in dreading the future. I've no patience with the notion that seems to be so many people's creed, that we can do nothing nobler than to be as miserable as possible. It is a dreadful remainder of that awful malady of Puritanism. Besides, where is the logic of supposing we shall be better prepared for any misfortune that may come if we can only contrive to dread it enough beforehand. Good heavens! We all need whatever strength we can get from happiness whenever it comes, as much as a plant needs the sunshine while it lasts. You wouldn't prepare a delicate plant for cloudy days by keeping it in the shadow; and I think one is simply an idiot who keeps in the shade to accustom himself to-day after to-morrow's storm." His excitement increased as he went on. He was arguing against the coward sense that he had deserved the troubles which had come upon him. He was saying in as plain language as the conditions of the conversation would allow, that he had been right in gratifying his desires; in living as he wished without too closely considering the consequences which were likely to follow. He spoke with a bitter earnestness born of the intense strain under which he was laboring; and he did not consider how his words might or might not affect his hearer. The thought came into his mind how he had deliberately sacrificed his convictions in marrying Edith Caldwell and going over to Philistinism; and he reflected that this decision had shaped his life. Already his course was determined; it was idle to ignore the fact. Why should he hesitate from squeamish scruples to do what Irons asked when to meet the consequences of the latter's anger would not only be supremely disagreeable but contrary to his whole theory of life? It was one of Fenton's peculiarities that he never knowingly shrank from telling himself the truth about his thoughts and actions with the most brutal frankness. Indeed, it might not be too much to say that this self-honesty was a sort of fetish to which he made expiatory sacrifices in the shape of the most cruelly disagreeable admissions before his inner consciousness. He constantly settled his moral accounts by setting down on the credit side "Self-contempt to balance," a method of mental bookkeeping by no means rare, albeit seldom carried on in connection with such clear powers of moral discrimination as Fenton possessed when he chose to exercise them.