more ready to pay a deposit on a new order than settle for goods already received.
"Let me know if I can do anything for you." That was what the world all generously said, whenever it was sure that one would be too proud to take it at its word.
Imprisoned and abandoned, Paul marvelled that anything so intangible as a point of view could bring one to such a pass—such an inevitable point of view, and such a phantastic pass! He disbelieved in martyrdom, yet knew that he would have been ready to make any sacrifice, even that of life itself, for his principle. He could only conclude that the issue had been after all a matter of life and death for him—the life or death of his individuality. He was still obsessed by the idea that he had something to express, in the sense that artists and thinkers "express." Had he yielded to mass reasoning and entered a fight which in no way touched his moral fibre, his message, he felt, would have been irretrievably lost. By sheltering the principles he had long nurtured, he hoped to bring his life to the point of blossoming, if not of fruit-bearing.
As the months crept by, months during which meditation was an antidote to the hideously importunate reality of his surroundings, his past took on new meaning, and the dejection into which he had settled gave place to a sombre ecstasy as, bit by bit, he puzzled out a future of self-realization—made it out tentatively, hopefully, romantically. The watching and recording faculty, the warder of his thoughts and emotions, told him he was going through hell, and an idealizing faculty, their chaplain, persuaded him that this was a necessary stage of his progress, that the fire would strip him of garments he had worn for the sake of convention. With this certitude to support him, the tension relaxed.
