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With a bleeding breast she returned home, her heart wounded by a fearful blow, the loss of a noble and beloved son, broken in spirit, and bowed down by the coldness and cruelty of the world, which, in the cowardly fear of its egoism, had become faithless, even to the holiest and most imperishable of all religions, the religion of memory!
During these days he half turned to Beatrice. How kind was her simple earth-warm affection, after the star-cold transcendentalism in which he had been living! How full of comfort was her unselfish humanity, after the pitiless egoism of the divine! And yet, while it momentarily soothed him, he realised, with a heart sad for Beatrice as for himself, that it could never satisfy him again.
Some of his complaining was even less coherent than this. It is absurd to take the morbid outpouring seriously, except in so far as it goes to prove that its writer was a victim of the sentimental egoism into which the psychological studies of the eighteenth century had degenerated, and to suggest that possibly if he had not been Napoleon he might have been a Werther.
But you, my friend, have simply copied the old monks in the arrangement of your life. There is nothing novel in your action, though just now your egoism is gratified by the sense of novelty and originality. You have simply gone out of the world to escape the evil of the world. You have bought yourself out of the conscription of life.
The egoism of her was not dead though the hidden woman had sprung up in vivid life. Her intellect was spurred into energy by the suffering of her pride and of her heart. Memory was restless and full of the passion of recall.
You will know speedily what it is that has prompted you to move. If passion blindfolds you, if you are foiled by a prejudice, I also shall know. My friend, the nursing of a single antipathy is a presumption that your motive force is personal whether the thirst for vengeance or some internal union of a hundred indistinct little fits of egoism.
Almost universally in Europe, political power is in the control of a handful of men who embody imperialist egoism. The people must share this power. Each nation has the right to control its own destinies, in accordance with its own ideas and the dictates of its own will. But once more, no illusions!
No woman had crossed that magic threshold until now, when her presence stirred all the blended emotions of his manhood. Humility, tenderness, reverence possessed him; self descended from its throne of egoism and yielded its scepter to another; the hot blood of the primitive, untamed Viking raced in his veins. Soul, mind, heart, body were all awakened.
Nothing more respectable. But he carried in his heart the confused pain of dismay and affection, of involuntary repulsion and pity. Very much like his daughter. Only in addition he felt a furious jealousy of the man he was going to see. A residue of egoism remains in every affection even paternal. She was positively the only thing, the one point where his thoughts found a resting-place, for years.
In theory it degenerated into a crude egoism, a vaunting and hyper-stoic hostility to nature, which, though intellectually godless, was not without that universal instinct for divinity which, by countless ways, seeks with an ever-present and importunate longing for the one sublimated and eternal source from which it sprang.
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