Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/52

 scattered. His sensuous contacts with the world diminished with amazing rapidity. He began to be concerned with words rather than with things; and things shrivelled and died and disappeared under the labels that he was taught to attach to them. His education, he perceives, operated like the old-fashioned dentistry, by killing off and extracting the nerves, so that a man in middle life should find himself with a set of dead and, theoretically, untroublesome bones in his mouth. (Only, it seems, these dead things festered.) His education was designed to make out of a piece of living matter a substantial economic block, useful for homebuilding, useful in the fundamental structure of society. He had been taken, so to speak, out of his own hands by the race, and had been thrust, half alive, into a chink of the wall, and on him an inscription had been carved: "Here lies a solid character. Requiescat in pace."

At just about this point one may predict with considerable assurance either that nothing at all will happen, or that something like a miracle will happen. Either Brown will quietly resign himself to being Brown for the rest of his days; or Brown will become that most dangerous type of rebel, a middle-aged rebel, and attempt to become something new and strange.

Let us assume first that at forty there is little rebellion left in this solid character. After a brief period of wistfulness, he surrenders to the indolence which men flatter with the name of destiny. He