It was assuredly not for the sake of benefiting mankind at large that he pursued his researches at all sacrifices and at all costs.  The prime object of all his consideration was himself, as he unhesitatingly admitted on all occasions, conceiving perhaps that it was easier to defend such a position than to disclaim it.  There could be no doubt that in the man’s enormous self-estimation, the Supreme Power occupied a place secondary to Keyork Arabian’s personality, and hostile to it.  And he had taken up arms, as Lucifer, assuming his individual right to live in spite of God, Man and Nature, convinced that the secret could be discovered and determined to find it and to use it, no matter at what price.  In him there was neither ambition, nor pride, nor vanity in the ordinary meaning of these words.  For passion ceases with the cessation of comparison between man and his fellows, and Keyork Arabian acknowledged no ground for such a comparison in his own case.  He had matched himself in a struggle with the Supreme Power, and, directly, with that Power’s only active representative on earth, with death.  It was well said of him that he had no beliefs, for he knew of no intermediate position between total suspension of judgment, and the certainty of direct knowledge.  And it was equally true that he was no atheist, as he had sanctimoniously declared of himself.  He admitted the existence of the Power; he claimed the right to assail it, and he grappled with the greatest, the most terrible, the most universal and the most stupendous of Facts, which is the Fact that all men die.  Unless he conquered, he must die also.  He was past theories, as he was beyond most other human weaknesses, and facts had for him the enormous value they acquire in the minds of men cut off from all that is ideal.

In Unorna he had found the instrument he had sought throughout half a lifetime.  With her he had tried the great experiment and pushed it to the very end; and when he conducted Israel Kafka to his home, he already knew that the experiment had succeeded.  His plan was a simple one.  He would wait a few months longer for the final result, he would select his victim, and with Unorna’s help he would himself grow young again.

“And who can tell,” he asked himself, “whether the life restored by such means may not be more resisting and stronger against deathly influences than before?  Is it not true that the older we grow the more slowly we grow old?  Is not the gulf which divides the infant from the man of twenty years far wider than that which lies between the twentieth and the fortieth years, and that again more full of rapid change than the third score?  Take, too, the wisdom of my old age as against the folly of a scarce grown boy, shall not my knowledge and care and forethought avail to make the same material last longer on the second trial than on the first?”