He shivered and wished he had not thought of the time when he meant to do great things, for this was one of the nights when he felt that he had done nothing and was nothing.  He saw his soul as something detached from his body and inimical to it, an enveloping substance, thin as smoke and acrid to the smell, which segregated him from the participation in reality which he felt to be his due, and he changed his position, and cleared his throat, and stared hard at the people round him and at the woman on the platform in hopes that some arresting gesture might summon him from this shadowy prison.  But the audience sat still in a sheeplike, grazing sort of attention, and Mrs. Ormiston continued to exercise her distinguished querulousness on the subject of male primogeniture.  So he remained rooted in this oppressive sense of his own nothingness.

“Oh, come, I’ve had an hour or two!” he reassured himself.  There were those three days and nights when he stood at the wheel of the Father Time, because the captain and every man who was wise about navigation were dying in their bunks of New Guinea fever; days that came up from the seas fresh as a girl from a bathe and turned to a torturing dome of fire; nights when he looked up at the sky and could not tell which were the stars and which the lights which trouble the eyes of sleep-sick men.  There was that week when he and Perez and the two French chemists and the handful of loyal workmen held the Romanones Works against the strikers.  He was conscious that he had behaved well on these occasions and that they had been full of beauty, but they had not nourished him.  They had ended when they ended.  Such deeds gave a man nothing better than the exultation of the actor, who loses his value and becomes a suspended soul, unable to fulfil his function when the curtain falls.  “But you are condemning the whole of human action!” he expostulated with himself.  “Yes, I am condemning the whole of human action,” he replied tartly.

There remained, of course, his scientific work.  That was indubitably good.  He had done well, considering he had not gone to South Kensington till he was twenty and had broken the habit of study by a life of adventure, simply because the idea of explosiveness had captured his imagination.  That rust is a slow explosion, that every movement is the result of a physical explosion, that explosives are capricious as women about the forces to which they yield, so that this one will only ignite with heat and that only with concussion—­these facts had from his earliest knowledge of them been gilded with irrational delight, and it had been no effort to him to work at the subject with an austere diligence that had shown itself worth while in that last paper he had read at the Paris Conference.  That was a pretty piece of research.  But now for the first time he resented his chemistry work because it was of no service to his personal life.  Before, it had always seemed to him the special dignity of his vocation