I like the worthy folk who will talk to you of the exercise of free will “at any rate for practical purposes.”  Free, is it?  For practical purposes!  Bosh!  How could I have refused to dine with that man?  I did not refuse simply because I could not refuse.  Curiosity, a healthy desire for a change of cooking, common civility, the talk and the smiles of the previous twenty days, every condition of my existence at that moment and place made irresistibly for acceptance; and, crowning all that, there was the ignorance, the ignorance, I say, the fatal want of foreknowledge to counter-balance these imperative conditions of the problem.  A refusal would have appeared perverse and insane.  Nobody unless a surly lunatic would have refused.  But if I had not got to know Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there would never have been a line of mine in print.

I accepted then—­and I am paying yet the price of my sanity.  The possessor of the only flock of geese on the East Coast is responsible for the existence of some fourteen volumes, so far.  The number of geese he had called into being under adverse climatic conditions was considerably more than fourteen.  The tale of volumes will never overtake the counting of heads, I am safe to say; but my ambitions point not exactly that way, and whatever the pangs the toil of writing has cost me I have always thought kindly of Almayer.

I wonder, had he known anything of it, what his attitude would have been?  This is something not to be discovered in this world.  But if we ever meet in the Elysian Fields—­where I cannot depict him to myself otherwise than attended in the distance by his flock of geese (birds sacred to Jupiter)—­and he addresses me in the stillness of that passionless region, neither light nor darkness, neither sound nor silence, and heaving endlessly with billowy mists from the impalpable multitudes of the swarming dead, I think I know what answer to make.

I would say, after listening courteously to the unvibrating tone of his measured remonstrances, which should not disturb, of course, the solemn eternity of stillness in the least—­I would say something like this: 

“It is true, Almayer, that in the world below I have converted your name to my own uses.  But that is a very small larceny.  What’s in a name, O Shade?  If so much of your old mortal weakness clings to you yet as to make you feel aggrieved (it was the note of your earthly voice, Almayer), then, I entreat you, seek speech without delay with our sublime fellow-Shade—­with him who, in his transient existence as a poet, commented upon the smell of the rose.  He will comfort you.  You came to me stripped of all prestige by men’s queer smiles and the disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands.  Your name was the common property of the winds:  it, as it were, floated naked over the waters about the Equator.  I wrapped round its unhonoured form the royal mantle of the tropics and have essayed to put into the hollow