Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/157

 with reality save through the evanescent emotions and sensations of that single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was passing now. This commonplace, so simple and so old, bewildered Kennaston when he came unreservedly to recognize its truth

To live was to be through his senses conscious, one by one, of a restricted number of these fractions of a second. Success in life, then, had nothing to do with bank-accounts or public office, or any step toward increasing the length of one's obituary notices, but meant to be engrossed utterly by as many as possible of these instants. And complete success required a finding, in these absorbing instants, of employment for every faculty he possessed. It was for this that Kennaston had always vaguely longed; and to this, if only in dreams, he now attained.

If only in dreams he debated: why, and was he not conscious, now, in his dreams, of every moment as it fled? And corporal life in banks and ballrooms and legislative halls and palaces, nowhere had anything more than that to offer mortal men.