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line, the simplicity, made one like to think that the sculp-
tor here had been touched with a genuine emotion. It was
an exquisite memorial to that than which the world offers
but one thing more precious, to a friendship; and as Philip
looked at it, he felt the tears come to his eyes. He thought of
Hayward and his eager admiration for him when first they
met, and how disillusion had come and then indifference,
till nothing held them together but habit and old memories.
It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person
every day for months and were so intimate with him that
you could not imagine existence without him; then separa-
tion came, and everything went on in the same way, and the
companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.
Your life proceeded and you did not even miss him. Philip
thought of those early days in Heidelberg when Hayward,
capable of great things, had been full of enthusiasm for the
future, and how, little by little, achieving nothing, he had
resigned himself to failure. Now he was dead. His death had
been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid
disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish
anything. It was just the same now as if he had never lived.
Philip asked himself desperately what was the use of
living at all. It all seemed inane. It was the same with Cron-
shaw: it was quite unimportant that he had lived; he was
dead and forgotten, his book of poems sold in remainder
by second-hand booksellers; his life seemed to have served
nothing except to give a pushing journalist occasion to write
an article in a review. And Philip cried out in his soul:
‘What is the use of it?’

Of Human Bondage