So far as he knew, nobody in the world admired him.  They might admire his work, but him personally they felt sorry for or despised.  Few even admired his work.  The Post had given him satisfactory proof of that.  Conant, Willoughby, and Smathers would admire it—­yes, wish to the Lord that they had written it.  But would that fill his cup to overflowing?  By the way, had not Fifi asked him that very question, too—­whether he would consider a life of that sort a successful life?  Well—­would he?  Or could it imaginably be said that Fifi, rather, had had a successful life, as evidenced by her profoundly interesting funeral?

Was it possible that a great authority on human society could make himself an even greater authority by personally assuming a part in the society which he theoretically administered?  Was it possible that he was missing some factor of large importance by his addiction to isolation and a schedule?

In short, was it conceivable that he had it all wrong from the beginning, as the young lady Charles Weyland had said?

The little Doctor lay still on his bed and his precious minutes slipped into hours....  If he finished his book at twenty-seven, what would he do with the rest of his life?  Besides defending it from possible criticism, besides expounding and amplifying it a little further as need seemed to be, there would be no more work for him to do.  Supreme essence of philosophy, history, and all science as it was, it was the final word of human wisdom.  You might say that with it the work of the world was done.  How then should he spend the remaining thirty or forty years of his life?  As matters stood now he had, so to say, twenty years start on himself.  Through the peculiar circumstances of his life, he had reached a point in his reading and study at twenty-four which another man could not hope to reach before he was forty-five or fifty.  Other men had done daily work for a livelihood, and had only their evenings for their heart’s desire.  Spencer was a civil engineer.  Mill was a clerk in an India house.  Comte taught mathematics.  But he, in all his life, had not averaged an hour a week’s enforced distraction:  all had gone to his own work.  You might say that he was entitled to a heavy arrears in this direction.  If he liked, he could idle for ten years, twenty years, and still be more than abreast of his age.

And as it was, he could not pretend that he had kept the faith, that he was inviolably holding his Schedule unspotted from the world.  No, he himself had outraged and deflowered the Schedule.  Klinker’s Exercises and the Post were deliberate impieties.  And he could not say that they had the sanction of his reason.  The exercises had only a partial sanction; the Post no sanction at all.  Both were but sops to wounded pride.  Here, then, was a pretty situation:  he, the triumphant rationalist, the toy of utterly irrational impulses—­of an utterly irrational instinct.  And this new impulse tugging at his inside, driving him to heed the irrational advice of his critics—­what could it be but part and parcel of the same mysterious but apparently deep-seated instinct?  And what was the real significance of this instinct, and what in the name of Jerusalem was the matter with him anyway?