against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life
for the fight against death."

He broke off to give emphasis to his last observation--after a moment he
yawned and resumed.

"I suppose that the beginning of the second phase of my education was a
ghastly dissatisfaction at being used in spite of myself for some
inscrutable purpose of whose ultimate goal I was unaware--if, indeed,
there _was_ an ultimate goal. It was a difficult choice. The
schoolmistress seemed to be saying, 'We're going to play football and
nothing but football. If you don't want to play football you can't
play at all--'

"What was I to do--the playtime was so short!

"You see, I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might
have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees.
Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly
smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn
day before a fire?--I don't think I did that. I was a great deal too
warm for that, and too alive.

"For it seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was
beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature--nature, that by
the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly
in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of the inferior and
thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher--or, let us say, her
more amusing--though still unconscious and accidental intentions. And,
actuated by the highest gifts of the enlightenment, we were seeking to