Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/118

106 'I shrugged back my shoulders with a half-sigh, half-groan,

'" I think I am ill," I said.

'He rose from his desk, where he was sitting examining some papers: came across to me and, smiling, put his hand on to my shoulder in his usual kindly unctuous manner. I could almost have struck him.

'"Come, come, come!" he said, "You must not mind now.—It will soon pass, this malaise. You have lived so much in yourself, that you find it very hard to live in other people?—Ah well, well! We most of us have that little difficulty to contend with sooner or later." But I, hanging down my head, bit my underlip with all my might for a moment. The pain made me master of myself. I looked up in his face, with my eyes hedged about with tears, but ready to listen to what he had to say to me.

'He pressed my shoulder with his hand:

'"Don't dream so, my boy," he said, "don't dream so. You're always at it, you know; and it's such a bad habit. It leads to absorption in one's own world, and that means selfishness. Why, I have known in my time at least three dreamers, who ruined all their own happiness and their families' as well, simply because they would have their dreams. Such are they whom the world calls 'geniuses' and their friends 'brutes,' for no sacrifice is too great for these precious empty dreams of theirs—not excluding the dreamers' lives. It angers me to hear people erecting special codes of morality for such men. Because a man is dubbed 'genius,' is he also to be dubbed demi-god, and allowed to pick and choose from the laws of the land, which he will be so good as to obey and which he won't?—Give up thinking that you can do anything, and there is a chance of your doing something. Get out of yourself and into other people: they are, probably, better than you are.—You don't mind me speaking like this to you? Now, do you now?"

'"No," I said, "it's true what you say. I live too much in myself, and I am impatient of what I think are other people's smallnesses … I will try to be more patient."