was quite the contrary); but I felt as if I were somehow blindly and unconsciously wasting myself in side-issues, and that the one great subject of my time—the genuine Zeitgeist—was escaping me. This made me very discontented, and the more so as I for long and long utterly failed to diagnose my disease.'
He paused, and Hastings listened to him with growing interest.
'Suddenly I seemed for the first time in my life to adequately realise myself, and I cannot tell you what joy my discovery gave me. The social problem was the one great subject of my time. It was the one question that entirely deserved and imperiously claimed a solution. Literature, art, and science were all good and to be pursued with all our strength; but what, as it were, gave the keynote to them all was the social problem. Men are, and always must be, the one supremely important subject to man—men as they live and move and have their being in this actual earth of ours at any given moment. The old solutions were—as any clear-eyed and intelligent person could see—utterly inadequate. What was the new solution? Was there a new solution?'
Once more he paused.
'It is strange,' said Hastings, 'how closely, so far, we both developed together.'
'Before this, as you know, I had dabbled in
