that which is unchangeable: human impotence, your own impotence. Lie still at my feet, do not move: I alone am."
That was the vision of his hopeless eyes. But desperation drove him on, wandering ever on and on to other lands, to other capitals, to other towns black with smoke: the smoke through which nothing shone, not a single gleam of hope. And for years it was the same: wandering, seeking, not finding; only seeing, knowing, realizing. But the more he saw, knew and realized, the more terrible it was to him that he could not find the very first word of the solution, the more terrible it became to him that only the sphinx remained, the immovable granite impotence; and her blank gaze seemed to utter her solitary revelation:
"I alone am. I am impotence; but I am immovable, I am omnipotent."
Then he had felt in himself the need to do still more, to be really a doer, a common workman, as they all were, everywhere, the poor and wretched. And he went to America, in order no longer to think, read, ponder, dream, see or know, but to do what they were all doing, the poor and wretched. And it was as he had succeeded in telling Constance at last, after so many hesitations: everything that was atavistic in him had prevented him from becoming a brother, a fellow-worker. But he was scarcely back in Europe before he felt the air around him
