his great idea. It was evident to White that this paper had been
worked over on several occasions since its first composition and
that Benham had intended to make it a part of his book. There were
corrections in pencil and corrections in a different shade of ink,
and there was an unfinished new peroration, that was clearly the
latest addition of all. Yet its substance had been there always.
It gave the youth just grown to manhood, but anyhow fully grown. It
presented the far-dreaming intellectualist shaped.

Benham had called it ARISTOCRACY. But he was far away by now from
political aristocracy.

This time he had not begun with definitions and generalizations, but
with a curiously subjective appeal. He had not pretended to be
theorizing at large any longer, he was manifestly thinking of his
own life and as manifestly he was thinking of life as a matter of
difficulty and unexpected thwartings.

"We see life," he wrote, "not only life in the world outside us, but
life in our own selves, as an immense choice of possibilities;
indeed, for us in particular who have come up here, who are not
under any urgent necessity to take this line or that, life is
apparently pure choice. It is quite easy to think we are all going
to choose the pattern of life we like best and work it out in our
own way. . . . And, meanwhile, there is no great hurry. . . .

"I want to begin by saying that choice isn't so easy and so
necessary as it seems. We think we are going to choose presently,
and in the end we may never choose at all. Choice needs perhaps
more energy than we think. The great multitude of older people we