Page 864 - of-human-bondage-

The effort was so incommensurate with the result. The
bright hopes of youth had to be paid for at such a bitter
price of disillusionment. Pain and disease and unhappiness
weighed down the scale so heavily. What did it all mean? He
thought of his own life, the high hopes with which he had
entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced upon
him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had
surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever
done anything but what seemed best to do, and what a crop-
per he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than
he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It
seemed pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just and
upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a
wherefore.
Thinking of Cronshaw, Philip remembered the Persian
rug which he had given him, telling him that it offered an
answer to his question upon the meaning of life; and sud-
denly the answer occurred to him: he chuckled: now that he
had it, it was like one of the puzzles which you worry over till
you are shown the solution and then cannot imagine how it
could ever have escaped you. The answer was obvious. Life
had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding
through space, living things had arisen under the influence
of conditions which were part of the planet’s history; and as
there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the in-
fluence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no
more significant than other forms of life, had come not as
the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the envi-
ronment. Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King