"Well," MacDonald said, "you had your hunt."

"Yes, sir."

"And you lost your tail, just like I said you would."

Andrews did not speak.

"That was what you wanted, wasn't it?" MacDonald asked.

"Maybe it was, in the beginning," Andrews said. "Part of it, at least."

"Young people," MacDonald said. "Always wanting to start from scratch. I know. You never figured that someone else knew what you was trying to do, did you?"

"I never thought about it," Andrews said. "Maybe because I didn't know what I was trying to do myself."

"Do you know now?"

Andrews moved restlessly.

"Young people," MacDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out."

"Yes, sir," Andrews said.

"Well, there's nothing," MacDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you——that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know that you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old."

There is no end to suffering in this world. There is no end to pain. However, in all this suffering, a great mystery is hidden. Nothing else will produce such a complete good as pain can. Pain does not discriminate and you cannot escape it. Nobody can take pain away from you. You may even be a king; however, if pain seizes you, you will have to bear it.

Start with bad writers: the indifferent, inconsistent, the dull, the utterly conventional, the tone deaf, and the grammatically, verbally, and orthographically incompetent. Their prose is certainly noticeable, filled as it is with clichés of all kinds, mistakes of all kinds, rhythmless sentences and paragraphs, repetition in sentence structure, and unintended word repetition. It has a sound, but it is the sound of fingernails on the blackboard, or, at best, a droning monotone.

"When I was young—"

"How young?"

"Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth—" She hesitated.

Port laughed abruptly. "And now you know it's not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And then that's when you're conscious of the bitter taste."

"But I'm always conscious of the unpleasant taste and of the end approaching," she said.

"Then you should give up smoking."