Instantly I knew I should, that I must, go to France, that I would live
there, that I would become as a Frenchman. I knew not when nor how, but
I knew I should go to France....

So my youth ran into manhood, finding its way from rock to rock like a
rivulet, gathering strength at each leap. One day my father was suddenly
called to Ireland. A few days after, a telegram came, and my mother read
that we were required at his bedside. We journeyed over land and sea,
and on a bleak country road, one winter's evening, a man approached us
and I heard him say that all was over, that my father was dead. I loved
my father; I burst into tears; and yet my soul said, "I am glad." The
thought came unbidden, undesired, and I turned aside, shocked at the
sight it afforded of my soul.

O, my father, I, who love and reverence nothing else, love and reverence
thee; thou art the one pure image in my mind, the one true affection
that life has not broken or soiled; I remember thy voice and thy kind,
happy ways. All I have of worldly goods and native wit I received from
thee--and was it I who was glad? No, it was not I; I had no concern in
the thought that then fell upon me unbidden and undesired; my individual
voice can give you but praise and loving words; and the voice that said
"I am glad" was not my voice, but that of the will to live which we
inherit from elemental dust through countless generations. Terrible and
imperative is the voice of the will to live: let him who is innocent
cast the first stone.

Terrible is the day when each sees his soul naked, stripped of all veil;
that dear soul which he cannot change or discard, and which is so
irreparably his.