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They stared, not at us, but at the road in front of them, with a dreadful apathy, as we passed. "This," I said, "is what finishes me every time I see it." She said nothing. "Do you realize," I said, "that those women and those little children are flying for their lives? That they've come, doubled up like that, for miles from Termonde or Alost? That they've lost everything they ever had?"
It is covered too thickly over and constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct.
It was only because my boyhood had been frozen up in those seven years of apathy and began to thaw out in later years, when manhood should have been taking the reins, that all that passage of childhood and unsophisticated devotion intruded in the wrong place, to fill up the void in the formation.
It is because some men and women are so sheltered from the storms of life by wealth and comfort that these piercing agonies which strike down to the uttermost depths so seldom reach them. Shiel half turned away, not sullen, not morose, but with a strange apathy settled on him. He had once heard a man say, "I feel as though I wanted to crawl into a hole and die."
"Only it's kind o' funny how things come out, ain't it? Took in! Nina Micheltoreña! Nice company he keeps one o' them Cachuca girls with eyelashes at half-mast!" Once more, she broke out into a fit of laughter. "Well, well," she resumed, "an' she sold 'im out for money! Ah, Jack Rance, you're a better guesser'n I am!" And with these words she sank down at the table in an apathy of misery.
After a few nights she ceased moaning, and settled gradually into a hopeless apathy, while over her deep gray eyes there grew a film of silent misery. Stirred by my fragmentary accounts of Eunice's wretchedness, the generous-hearted Bessie one day suggested that we take her with us to look for a job as soon as the anticipated "lay-off" notice came into effect at Rosenfeld's.
"Such are the lamentations, though rarely so eloquently uttered, which we daily hear on the loss of some possession, which, while held, was scarcely noticed; and could preserve its owner, neither from the gloom of apathy, nor the irritation of discontent.
It has been found impossible in the States to find a just medium between state-support, and the apathy which in the opinion of many it has a tendency to engender, and an unmodified voluntary system, with the subservience and "high-pressure" which are incidental to it.
It will be readily believed that I vividly recalled this conversation when, many years after, I read an account by the Prince of Monaco of HIS discovery of a gigantic squid, to which his naturalist gave the name of LEPIDOTEUTHIS GRIMALDII! Truly the indifference and apathy manifested by whalers generally to everything except commercial matters is wonderful hardly to be credited.
In the instance of Taste, the process has been reversed; and from the prevalence of dispositions at once injurious and discreditable, being no other than that selfishness which is the child of apathy, which, as Nations decline in productive and creative power, makes them value themselves upon a presumed refinement of judging.
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