to him as gross in their minds as in their bodies, and it surprised him to find that though many men seemed to think as he did about these women, they were not repelled as he was, but accepted them willingly, even greedily, as instruments of pleasure and afterwards as mothers of children.  But I am not as these men are, he said; my father must bear his sorrow like another; and in meditation it seemed to him that it would not be reasonable that his father should get everything he desired and his son nothing.

His father had gotten more out of life than ever he should get; he would have his son till he died (so far as he could he would secure him that satisfaction), and after death this world and its shows concern us not.  But it may well be that we die out of one life to be born into another life, that everything that passes is replaced by an equivalent, he said, repeating the words of a Greek philosopher to whom he had been much addicted in happy days gone by, and that reality is but an eternal shaping and reshaping of things.  All that is beyond doubt, he continued, is that things pass too quickly for us to have any certain knowledge of them, our only standard being our own flitting impressions; and as all men bring a different sensitiveness into the world, knowledge is a word without meaning, for there can be no knowledge.  Every race is possessed of a different sensitiveness, he said, as he passed up the Mount of Olives on his way home.  We ask for miracles, but the Greeks are satisfied with reason.  Am I Greek or Jew? he asked, for he was looking forward to some silent hours with a book of Greek philosophy and hoped to forget himself in the manuscript.  But he could not always keep his thoughts on the manuscript, and, forgetful of Heraclitus, he often sat thinking of Jesus’ promise—­that one morning men would awake to find that God had come to judge the world and divide it among those that repented their sins.  He remembered he had forfeited his share in the Kingdom for his father’s sake, or had he been driven out of the community because his belief in the coming of the Kingdom was insufficient?  It is true that his belief had wavered, but he had always believed.  Even his natural humility, of which he was conscious, did not allow him to doubt that his belief in Jesus was less fervid than that of Peter, James, John and the residue.  The conviction was always quick in him that he felt more deeply than these publicans and fishers, yet Jesus retained them and sent him away.

The manuscript glided from his hand to the floor, and his thoughts wandered back to Alexandria, and he sat thinking that death must be rather the beginning than the end of things, for it were impossible to believe that life was an end in itself.  Heraclitus was right:  his present life could be nothing else but the death of another life.  And as if to enforce this doctrine a recollection of his grandmother intruded upon his meditation.  She was seventy-eight