Some faith indeed had given him strength to renounce those things in life I had held dear, driven him on to fight until his exhausted body failed him, and even now that he was physically helpless sustained him.  I did not ask myself, then, the nature of this faith.  In its presence it could no more be questioned than the light.  It was light; I felt bathed in it.  Now it was soft, suffused:  but I remembered how the night before in the hall, just before he had fallen, it had flashed forth in a smile and illumined my soul with an ecstasy that yet was anguish....

“We shall get back,” I said at length.  My remark was not a question—­it had escaped from me almost unawares.

“The joy is in the journey,” he answered.  “The secret is in the search.”

“But for me?” I exclaimed.

“We’ve all been lost, Paret.  It would seem as though we have to be.”

“And yet you are—­saved,” I said, hesitating over the word.

“It is true that I am content, even happy,” he asserted, “in spite of my wish to live.  If there is any secret, it lies, I think, in the struggle for an open mind, in the keeping alive of a desire to know more and more.  That desire, strangely enough, hasn’t lost its strength.  We don’t know whether there is a future life, but if there is, I think it must be a continuation of this.”  He paused.  “I told you I was glad you came in—­I’ve been thinking of you, and I saw you in the hall last night.  You ask what there is for you—­I’ll tell you,—­the new generation.”

“The new generation.”

“That’s the task of every man and woman who wakes up.  I’ve come to see how little can be done for the great majority of those who have reached our age.  It’s hard—­but it’s true.  Superstition, sentiment, the habit of wrong thinking or of not thinking at all have struck in too deep, the habit of unreasoning acceptance of authority is too paralyzing.  Some may be stung back into life, spurred on to find out what the world really is, but not many.  The hope lies in those who are coming after us—­we must do for them what wasn’t done for us.  We really didn’t have much of a chance, Paret.  What did our instructors at Harvard know about the age that was dawning? what did anybody know?  You can educate yourself—­or rather reeducate yourself.  All this”—­and he waved his hand towards his bookshelves—­“all this has sprung up since you and I were at Cambridge; if we don’t try to become familiar with it, if we fail to grasp the point of view from which it’s written, there’s little hope for us.  Go away from all this and get straightened out, make yourself acquainted with the modern trend in literature and criticism, with modern history, find out what’s being done in the field of education, read the modern sciences, especially biology, and psychology and sociology, and try to get a glimpse of the fundamental human needs underlying such phenomena as the labour and woman’s movements.  God knows I’ve just begun to get my glimpse, and I’ve floundered around ever since I left college....  I don’t mean to say we can ever see the whole, but we can get a clew, an idea, and pass it on to our children.  You have children, haven’t you?”