home, stick-in-the-mud life.

But we are not all made like this, and it is only possible for a
few people to live so by the fact that most people prefer to stay
at home and do the work of the world. My cousin was not a worker,
and, indeed, did no work except under compulsion and in order to
live; but such people seem to belong to an older order, and are
more like children playing about, and at leisure to play because
others work to feed and clothe them. The world would be a wretched
and miserable place if all tried to live life on those lines.

It would be impossible to me to live so, though I dare say I should
be a better man if I had had a little more hardship of that kind;
but I have worked hard in my own way, and though I have had few
hairbreadth escapes, yet I have had sharp troubles and slow
anxieties. I have been like the man in the story, between the lion
and the lizard for many months together; and I have had more to
bear, by temperament and fortune, than my roving cousin ever had to
endure; so that because a life seems both sheltered and prosperous,
it need not therefore have been without its adventures and escapes
and its haunting fears.

The more one examines into life and the motives of it, the more
does one perceive that the imagination, concerning itself with
hopes of escape from any conditions which hamper and confine us, is
the dynamic force that is transmuting the world. The child is for
ever planning what it will do when it is older, and dreams of an
irresponsible choice of food and an unrestrained use of money; the
girl schemes to escape from the constraints of home by independence
or marriage; the professional man plans to make a fortune and