As on the day when Fifi had asked him her innocent question about altruism, a sudden tide swept the young man’s thoughts inward.  And after them, this time, groped the blundering feet of his spirit.

Here was he, a mature man, who, in point of work, in all practical and demonstrable ways, was the millionth man.  He was a great editorial writer, which was a minor but genuine activity.  He was a yet greater writer on social science, which was one of the supreme activities.  On this side, then, certainly the chief side, there could be no question about the successfulness of his life.  His working life was, or would be before he was through, brilliantly successful.  But it had for some time been plain to him that he stopped short there.  He was a great workman, but that was all.  He was a superb rationalist; but after that he did not exist.

Through the science of Human Intercourse, he saw much more of people now than he had ever done before, and thus it had become driven home upon him that most people had two lives, their outer or practical lives, and their inner or personal lives.  But he himself had but one life.  He was a machine; a machine which turned out matchless work for the enlightenment of the world, but after all a machine.  He was intellect.  He was Pure Reason.  Yet he himself had said, and written, that intellectual supremacy was not the true badge of supremacy of type.  There was nothing sure of races that was not equally sure of the individuals which make up those races.  Yet intellect was all he was.  Vast areas of thought, feeling, and conduct, in which the people around him spent so much of their time, were entirely closed to him.  He had no personal life at all.  That part of him had atrophied from lack of use, like the eyes of the mole and of those sightless fishes men take from the waters of caverns.

And now this part of him, which had for some time been stirring uneasily, had risen suddenly without bidding of his and in defiance of his reason, and laid hold of something in his environment.  In doing so, it appeared to have thrust upon him an inner, or personal, life from this time forward.  That life lay in being of use to the old man before him:  he who had never been of personal use to anybody so far, and the miserable old man who had no comfort anywhere but in him.

He knew the scientific name of this kind of behavior very well.  It was altruism, the irrational force that had put a new face upon the world.  Fifi, he remembered well, had assured him that in altruism he would find that fiercer happiness which was as much better than content as being well was better than not being sick.  But ... could this be happiness, this whirling confusion that put him to such straits to keep a calm face above the tumult of his breast?  If this was happiness, then it came to him for their first meeting wearing a strange face....

“You know the story?”

Queed moved in his chair.  “Yes.  I—­have heard it.”