figments of his imagination and himself no more than a shadow, a something that moved and that must move across the valley of Jehoshaphat and up the Mount of Olives.  Why that way more than any other way? he asked himself:  because it is the shortest way.  As if that mattered, he added, and as soon as he reached the top of the Mount of Olives he looked over the desert and was surprised by the smallness of the hills; like the people who lived among them, they seemed to him to have dwindled.  The world is much smaller than I thought, he said.  That is it, the world seems to have dwindled into a sort of ash-heap; life has become as tasteless as ashes.  It can only end, he said to himself, by my discovering something that interests me, but nothing interests me except Jesus.  Lack of desire, he said, is my burden, for, desiring one thing too much, I have lost desire for all else, and that is why life has come to me like an ash-heap.

As the days went by he began to feel life more oppressive and unendurable, till one evening the thought crossed his mind that change of scene might be a great benefit to him.  If he were to go to Egypt, he would journey for fifteen days through the desert, the rocking stride of the camel would keep him from thinking, and he might arrive in Egypt eager to listen to the philosophers again.  But the temptations that Egypt presented faded almost as soon as they had arisen, and he deemed that it might be better for him to choose a city oversea.  A sea voyage, he thought, will cheer me more than a long journey across the desert, and Joppa is but a day’s journey from Jerusalem.  But the shipping is more frequent from Caesarea, and it is not as far; and for a moment it seemed to him that he would like to be on board a ship watching the wind making the sail beautiful.  But to what port should he be making for? he asked.  Why not to Greece?—­for there are philosophers as great or greater than those of Alexandria.  But philosophers are out of my humour, he added, and, putting Athens aside, he bethought himself of Corinth, and the variegated world he would meet there.  From every port ships come to Corinth, bringing different habits, customs, languages, religions; and for the better part of the evening Corinth seemed to be his destination.

Corinth was famous for its courtesans, and he remembered suddenly that the most celebrated were collected there; and it may have been the courtesans that kept him from this journey, and his thoughts turning from vice to marriage a bitterness rose up in his mind against his father for the persistency with which Dan reminded him in and out of season that every man’s duty is to bring children into the world.