It was not Holman alone who had seemed to make this imputation of indolence. What the man had conveyed in speech, the girl's eyes had expressed with even greater effectiveness. It was what he had read in the girl's eyes that weighed with him now; it left him with a feeling of insufficiency and incompetence. He experienced an unaccustomed sense of shame at the thought that he was as a piece of flotsam which is set moving with the tide. He resented, but could not overcome, this unusual self-depreciation. For the first time he saw himself impartially, and recognised his limitations with surprising clearness. And all because a pair of brown, earnest eyes had seemed to accuse him of trifling with life, which was a serious problem and not the game he would have it. They were wise brown eyes, and carried persuasion. For the only time within his memory he felt dissatisfied with himself. He looked into the past, and saw it a waste of opportunity; he looked at the present, and frowned, and dismissed it without comment; he attempted to view the future; but the future stretched vague and unsubstantial along a vista of untrodden years, years in which he foresaw waste also-- always waste; unless he pulled himself together and made some appreciable endeavour to justify his existence. Life held obligations which he had not recognised before that day; perhaps because only then was born in him the consciousness that no life can be lived independently; the individual stands in responsible relationship to the race. "By Jove!" he muttered, and struck the arm of his chair twice in rapid succession with his open palm, and continued to stare at the sunlight. "I wonder what has set my thoughts in this direction? I can't remember that these things ever troubled me before." He passed his hand over his eyes; then he took the hand from before his face and contemplated it with interest, looking at it with a sort of surprised curiosity, as though until that moment he had not appreciated its strength. He opened and closed the fingers deliberately, attentively regarding the prominent knuckles that showed white against the sunburnt skin. It was a large hand, and broad, the hand of a mechanic; and it was covered, as were his arms and chest, with fine gold hairs. Evidence of strength was not lacking here, or in the long legs stretched out on the rests of his chair. He turned his attention to his legs, brought his feet deliberately to the stone floor, and sat up straighter. "I suppose it amounts to this," he reflected, "that I'm something of a rotter, and am only now awaking to the fact."