Page 866 - of-human-bondage-

joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and sing. He had
not been so happy for months.
‘Oh, life,’ he cried in his heart, ‘Oh life, where is thy
sting?’
For the same uprush of fancy which had shown him with
all the force of mathematical demonstration that life had no
meaning, brought with it another idea; and that was why
Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As
the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the plea-
sure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if
one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his
choosing, so might a man look at his life, that it made a pat-
tern. There was as little need to do this as there was use. It
was merely something he did for his own pleasure. Out of
the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his
thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, com-
plicated, or beautiful; and though it might be no more than
an illusion that he had the power of selection, though it
might be no more than a fantastic legerdemain in which ap-
pearances were interwoven with moonbeams, that did not
matter: it seemed, and so to him it was. In the vast warp
of life (a river arising from no spring and flowing endless-
ly to no sea), with the background to his fancies that there
was no meaning and that nothing was important, a man
might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various
strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern,
the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man
was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children,
toiled for his bread, and died; but there were others, intri-