Where No Fear Was

I

THE SHADOW





There surely may come a time for each of us, if we have lived with
any animation or interest, if we have had any constant or even
fitful desire to penetrate and grasp the significance of the
strange adventure of life, a time, I say, when we may look back a
little, not sentimentally or with any hope of making out an
impressive case for ourselves, and interrogate the memory as to
what have been the most real, vivid, and intense things that have
befallen us by the way. We may try to separate the momentous from
the trivial, and the important from the unimportant; to discern
where and how and when we might have acted differently; to see and
to say what has really mattered, what has made a deep mark on our
spirit; what has hampered or wounded or maimed us. Because one of
the strangest things about life seems to be our incapacity to
decide beforehand, or even at the time, where the real and fruitful
joys, and where the dark dangers and distresses lie. The things
that at certain times filled all one's mind, kindled hope and aim,
seemed so infinitely desirable, so necessary to happiness, have
faded, many of them, into the lightest and most worthless of husks
and phantoms, like the withered flowers that we find sometimes shut
in the pages of our old books, and cannot even remember of what