hut, or show kindness to a child. It is a folly I will not even
dispute about, that man's only natural implement is the spade.
Imagination, pride, exalted desire are just as much Man, as are
hunger and thirst and sexual curiosities and the panic dread of
unknown things. . . .

"Now you see better what I mean about choice. Now you see what I am
driving at. We have to choose each one for himself and also each
one for the race, whether we will accept the muddle of the common
life, whether we ourselves will be muddled, weakly nothings,
children of luck, steering our artful courses for mean success and
tawdry honours, or whether we will be aristocrats, for that is what
it amounts to, each one in the measure of his personal quality an
aristocrat, refusing to be restrained by fear, refusing to be
restrained by pain, resolved to know and understand up to the hilt
of his understanding, resolved to sacrifice all the common stuff of
his life to the perfection of his peculiar gift, a purged man, a
trained, selected, artificial man, not simply free, but lordly free,
filled and sustained by pride. Whether you or I make that choice
and whether you or I succeed in realizing ourselves, though a great
matter to ourselves, is, I admit, a small matter to the world. But
the great matter is this, that THE CHOICE IS BEING MADE, that it
will continue to be made, and that all around us, so that it can
never be arrested and darkened again, is the dawn of human
possibility. . . ."

(White could also see his dead friend's face with its enthusiastic
paleness, its disordered hair and the glowing darknesses in the
eyes. On such occasions Benham always had an expression of ESCAPE.
Temporary escape. And thus would his hand have clutched the