Chapter 11

From the town, lapped in slumber, it seemed as if the spirit of the age rushed into his room--an age fraught with dangers, demands, and tension of all kinds. It demanded men--demanded of all men all their ambition, self-discipline, intelligence, selflessness ... selflessness. It should take him! There he was, free alike from arrogance and from indolence! Might there not be, he asked himself in his ecstatic monologue, a new democracy which should redeem the past? Was that the goal towards which the present gloom was…