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the world he loved so well. I wondered whether it was the thought of
this, never quite absent from his mind, that gave him the peculiar zest
with which he enjoyed every moment of the day.
I should do him an injustice if I omitted to state that he was not
at all in the habit of talking about himself. I think the friend I was
staying with was the only person in whom he had confided. I believe
he only told me the story because he suspected I already knew it, and
on the evening on which he told it me he had drunk a good deal of
wine.
My visit drew to a close and I left the island. The year after,
war broke out. A number of things happened to me, so that the course
of my life was greatly altered, and it was thirteen years -before I went
to Capri again. My friend had been back some time, but he was no
longer so well off, and had moved into a house that had no room for
me; so I was putting up at the hotel. He came to meet me at the boat
and we dined together. During dinner I asked him where exactly his
house was.
"You know it," he answered. "It's the little place Wilson had.
I've built on a room and made it quite nice."
With so many other things to occupy my mind I had not given
Wilson a thought for years; but now, with a little shock, I
remembered. The ten years he had before him when I made his
acquaintance must have elapsed long ago.
"Did he commit suicide as he said he would? "
"It's rather a grim story."
Wilson's plan was all right. There was only one flaw in it and
this, I suppose, he could not have foreseen. It had never occurred to
him that after twenty-five years of complete happiness, in this quiet
backwater, with nothing in the world to disturb his serenity, his
character would gradually lose its strength. The will needs obstacles
in order to exercise its power; when it is never thwarted, when no
effort is needed to achieve one's desires, because one has placed one's
desires only in the things that can be obtained by stretching out one's
hand, the will grows impotent. If you walk on a level all the time the
muscles you need to climb a mountain will atrophy. These
observations are trite, but there they are. When Wilson's annuity
expired he had no longer the resolution to make the end which was
the price he had agreed to pay for that long period of happy
tranquillity. I do not think, as far as I could gather, both from what