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If he liked, he could idle for ten years, twenty years, and
still be more than abreast of his age.
And as it was, he could not pretend that he had kept the faith, that he
was inviolably holding his Schedule unspotted from the world. No, he
himself had outraged and deflowered the Schedule. Klinker's Exercises
and the _Post_ were deliberate impieties. And he could not say that they
had the sanction of his reason. The exercises had only a partial
sanction; the _Post_ no sanction at all. Both were but sops to wounded
pride. Here, then, was a pretty situation: he, the triumphant
rationalist, the toy of utterly irrational impulses--of an utterly
irrational instinct. And this new impulse tugging at his inside, driving
him to heed the irrational advice of his critics--what could it be but
part and parcel of the same mysterious but apparently deep-seated
instinct? And what was the real significance of this instinct, and what
in the name of Jerusalem was the matter with him anyway?
* * * * *
He was twenty-four years old, without upbringing, and utterly alone in
the world.


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