The world-sickness of the White Logic makes one grin jocosely into the face of the Noseless One and to sneer at all the phantasmagoria of living. I look about me as I ride and on every hand I see the merciless and infinite waste of natural selection. The White Logic insists upon opening the long-closed books, and by paragraph and chapter states the beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and dust. About me is murmur and hum, and I know it for the gnat- swarm of the living, piping for a little space its thin plaint of troubled air. I return across the ranch.
Twilight is on, and the hunting animals are out.
I watch the piteous tragic play of life feeding on life. Here is no morality. Yet all this I knew before, in the weary days of my long sickness. I did but stir them, and let them lie. I was too wise, too wicked wise, to wake them.