The awful penalty of success is the haunting dread of subsequent
failure, and even sadder still is the fact that in striving eagerly
to attain an end, we are apt to lose the sense of the purpose which
inspired us. This is more drearily true of the pursuit of money
than of anything else. I could name several friends of my own who
started in business with the perfectly definite and avowed
intention of making a competence in order that they might live as
they desired to live; that they might travel, read, write, enjoy a
secure leisure. But when they had done exactly what they meant to
do, the desires were all atrophied. They could not give up their
work; they felt it would be safer to have a larger margin, they
feared they might be bored, they had made friends, and did not wish
to sever the connection, they must provide a little more for their
families: the whole programme had insensibly altered. Even so they
were still planning to escape from something--from some boredom or
anxiety or dread.

And yet it seems very difficult for any person to realise what is
the philosophical conclusion, namely, that the work of each of us
matters very little to the world, but that it matters very much to
ourselves that we should have some work to do. We seem to be a very
feeble-minded race in this respect, that we require to be
constantly bribed and tempted by illusions. I have known men of
force and vigour both in youth and middle life who had a strong
sense of the value and significance of their work; as age came upon
them, the value of their work gradually disappeared; they were
deferred to, consulted, outwardly reverenced, and perhaps all the
more scrupulously and compassionately in order that they might not
guess the lamentable fact that their work was done and that the