It is all a matter of feeling, then? But it seems hard on people that
they should be so dull and stupid about it all,--that the truth should
lie so close to their hand and yet be so carefully concealed."
"Oh, they grow out of dulness!" he said, with a movement of his hand;
"that is what experience does for us--it is always going on; we get
widened and deepened. Why," he added, "I have seen a great man, as they
called him, clever and alert, who held a high position in the State. He
was laid aside by a long and painful illness, so that all his work was
put away. He was brave about it, too, I remember; but he used to think
to himself how sad and wasteful it was, that when he was most energetic
and capable he should be put on the shelf--all the fine work he might
have done interrupted; all the great speeches he would have made
unuttered. But as a matter of fact, he was then for the first time
growing fast, because he had to look into the minds and hearts of all
sorrowful and disappointed people, and to learn that what we do matters
so little, and that what we are matters so much. When he did at last
get back to the world, people said, 'What a sad pity to see so fine a
career spoilt!' But out of all the years of all his lives, those years
had been his very best and richest, when he sat half the day feeble in
the sun, and could not even look at the papers which lay beside him, or
when he woke in the grey mornings, with the thought of another miserable
day of idleness and pain before him.
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