“Rot!” said Wratislaw.  “In that sort of thing you have the courage of your kind.  You are the wrong sort of breed for common shirking cowards.  Why, man, you might get the Victoria Cross ten times over with ease, as far as that goes.  Only you wouldn’t, for you are something much more subtle and recondite than a coward.”

It was Lewis’s turn for the request.  “I am prepared to hear,” he said.

“A fool!  An arrant, extraordinary fool!  A fool of quality and parts, a fool who is the best fellow in the world and who has every virtue a man can wish, but at the same time a conspicuous monument of folly.  And it is this that I have come to speak about.”

Lewis sat back in his chair with his eyes fixed on the glowing coal.

“I want you to make it all plain,” he said slowly.  “I know it all already; I have got the dull, dead consciousness of it in my heart, but I want to hear it put into words.”  And he set his lips like a man in pain.

“It is hard,” said Wratislaw, “devilish hard, but I’ve got to try.”  He knocked out the ashes from his pipe and leaned forward.

“What would you call the highest happiness, Lewie?” he asked.

“The sense of competence,” was the answer, given without hesitation.

“Right.  And what do we mean by competence?  Not success!  God knows it is something very different from success!  Any fool may be successful, if the gods wish to hurt him.  Competence means that splendid joy in your own powers and the approval of your own heart, which great men feel always and lesser men now and again at favoured intervals.  There are a certain number of things in the world to be done, and we have got to do them.  We may fail—­it doesn’t in the least matter.  We may get killed in the attempt—­it matters still less.  The things may not altogether be worth doing—­it is of very little importance.  It is ourselves we have got to judge by.  If we are playing our part well, and know it, then we can thank God and go on.  That is what I call happiness.”

“And I,” said Lewis.

“And how are you to get happiness?  Not by thinking about it.  The great things of the world have all been done by men who didn’t stop to reflect on them.  If a man comes to a halt and analyses his motives and distrusts the value of the thing he strives for, then the odds are that his halt is final.  You strive to strive and not to attain.  A man must have that direct practical virtue which forgets itself and sees only its work.  Parsons will tell you that all virtue is self-sacrifice, and they are right, though not in the way they mean.  It may all seem a tissue of contradictions.  You must not pitch on too fanciful a goal, nor, on the other hand, must you think on yourself.  And it is a contradiction which only resolves itself in practice, one of those anomalies on which the world is built up.”

Lewis nodded his head.