The day after Jean Jacques had got a new lease of life and become his own
banker, he treated himself to one of those interludes of pleasure from
which he had emerged in the past like a hermit from his cave. He sat on
the hill above his lime-kilns, reading the little hand-book of philosophy
which had played so big a part in his life. Whatever else had disturbed
his mind and diverted him from his course, nothing had weaned him from
this obsession. He still interlarded all his conversation with
quotations from brilliant poseurs like Chateaubriand and Rochefoucauld,
and from missionaries of thought like Hume and Hegel.

His real joy, however, was in withdrawing for what might be called a
seance of meditation from the world's business. Some men make
celebration in wine, sport and adventure; but Jean Jacques made it in
flooding his mind with streams of human thought which often tried to run
uphill, which were frequently choked with weeds, but still were like the
pool of Siloam to his vain mind. They bathed that vain mind in the
illusion that it could see into the secret springs of experience.

So, on as bright a day as ever the New World offered, Jean Jacques sat
reciting to himself a spectacular bit of logic from one of his idols,
wedged between a piece of Aristotle quartz and Plato marble. The sound
of it was good in his ears. He mouthed it as greedily and happily as
though he was not sitting on the edge of a volcano instead of the moss-
grown limestone on a hill above his own manor.

"The course of events in the life of a man, whatever their gravity or
levity, are only to be valued and measured by the value and measure of
his own soul. Thus, what in its own intrinsic origin and material should
in all outer reason be a tragedy, does not of itself shake the