“That is why I do not wish to be idle,” said Helen.

“It is just because people do not know this fact about the soul,” the other continued, “and are not willing to dare and suffer, and overcome dullness, and keep their spiritual faculties free, that they sink down as they grow older, and become what they call practical, and talk very wisely about experience.  It is only when God sends into the world a man of genius that no mountains of earth can crush, and who keeps his faith and sweetness all through his life that we learn the baseness of the thought that experience necessarily brings cynicism and selfishness.  There is to me in all this world nothing more hateful than this disillusioned worldliness, and nothing makes me angrier than to see it taking the name of wisdom.  If I were a man with an art, there is nothing, I think, that I should feel more called to make war upon; it is a very blow in the face of God.  Nothing makes me sadder than to see the life that such people live,—­to see for instance how pathetic are the things they call their entertainments; and when one knows himself that life is a magic potion, to be drank with rapture and awe,—­that every instance of it ought to be a hymn of rejoicing, and the whole of it rich and full of power, like some majestic symphony.  I often find myself wishing that there were some way of saving the time that people spend in their pleasures;

    “’Life piled on life
  Were all too little, and of one to me
  Little remains.’

As I kneel before God’s altar of the heart I know that if I had infinite time and infinite energy there would be beauty and joy still to seek, and so as I look about me in the world and see all the sin and misery that is in it, it is my comfort to know that the reason for it is that men are still living the lives of the animals, and have not even dreamed of the life that belongs to them as men.  That is something about which I feel very strongly myself,—­that is part of my duty as a man who seeks worship and rightness to mark that difference in my own life quite plainly.”

Mr. Howard paused for a moment, and Helen said very earnestly, “I wish that you would tell me about that.”

“I consider it my duty,” the other replied, “to keep all the external circumstances of my life as simple and as humble as I should have to if I were quite poor.  If I were not physically unable, I should feel that I ought to do for my own self all that I needed to have done, for I think that if it is necessary that others should be degraded to menial service in order that my soul might be beautiful and true, then life is bad at the heart of it, and I want none of its truth and beauty.  I do not have to look into my heart very long, Miss Davis, to discover that what I am seeking in life is something that no millions of money can buy me; and when I am face to face with the sternness of what I call that spiritual fact, I see that fine houses and all the rest are