distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the
community. He does it without any fee or reward except his personal
self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any
hope of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable
Rationalist. No doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of
recognition. No doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power,
from the spending and husbanding of large sums of public money, and
from the inevitable proprietorship he must feel in the fair, fine,
well-ordered schools he has done so much to develop. "But for me,"
he can say, "there would have been a Job about those diagrams, and
that subject or this would have been less ably taught." . . .

The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not
to content at any rate to keep him working. Of course he covets the
notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of
his mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get
credit. Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they
were noting, with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-
conscious while there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or
other; it would, I have no doubt, please him greatly if his work
were to flower into a crimson gown in some Academic parterre. Why
shouldn't it? But that is incidental vanity at the worst; he goes
on anyhow. Most men don't.

But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now. He was oldish
even then as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age.
Long may his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the
world! He lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more
now and listens less, toilsomely disentangling what you already
understand, giving you in detail the data you know; these are things