"Tomorrow will be like today, and day after tomorrow will be like day
before yesterday," said Apollonius. "I see your remaining days each as
quiet, tedious collections of hours. You will not travel anywhere. You
will think no new thoughts. You will experience no new passions. Older
you will become but not wiser. Stiffer but not more dignified.
Childless you are, and childless you shall remain. Of that suppleness
you once commanded in your youth, of that strange simplicity which once
attracted a few men to you, neither endures, nor shall you recapture any
of them any more. People will talk to you and visit with you out of
sentiment or pity, not because you have anything to offer them. Have
you ever seen an old cornstalk turning brown, dying, but refusing to
fall over, upon which stray birds alight now and then, hardly remarking
what it is they perch on? That is you. I cannot fathom your place in
life's economy. A living thing should either create or destroy
according to its capacity and caprice, but you, you do neither. You
only live on dreaming of the nice things you would like to have happen
to you but which never happen; and you wonder vaguely why the young
lives about you which you occationally chide for a fancied impropriety
never listen to you and seem to flee at your approach. When you die you
will be buried and forgotten, and that is all. The morticians will
enclose you in a worm-proof casket, thus sealing even unto eternity the
clay of your uselessness. And for all the good or evil, creation or
destruction, that your living might have accomplished, you might just as
well never have lived at all. I cannot see the purpose in such a life.
I can see in it only vulgar, shocking waste."
"I though you said you didn't evaluate lives," snapped Mrs.
Cassan.
"I'm not evaluating; I'm only wondering. Now you dream of an oil well
to be found on twenty acres of land you own in New Mexico. There is no
oil there. You dream of some tall, dark, handsome man to come wooing
you. There is no man coming, dark, tall, or otherwise. And yet you
will dream on in spite of all I tell you; dream on through your little
round of hours, sewing and rocking and gossiping and dreaming; and the
world spins and spins and spins. Children are born, grow up,
accomplish, sicken, and die; you sit and rock and sew and gossip and
live on. And you have a voice in the government, and enough people
voting the same way you vote could change the face of the world. There
is something terrible in that thought. But your individual opinion on
any subject in the world is absolutely worthless. No, I cannot fathom
the reason for your existence."
"I didn't pay you to fathom me. Just tell me my future and let it go at
that."
"I have been telling you your future! Why don't you listen? Do you
want to know how many more times you will eat lettuce or boiled eggs?
Shall I enumerate the instances you will yell good-morning to your
neighbor across the fence? Must I tell you how many more times you will
buy stockings, attend church, go to moving picture shows? Shall I make
a list showing how many more gallons of water in the future you will
boil making tea, how many more combinations of cards will fall to you at
auction bridge, how often the telephone will ring in your remaining
years? Do you want to know how many more times you will scold the
paper-carrier for not leaving your copy in the spot that irks you least?
Must I tell you how many more times you will become annoyed at the
weather because it rains or fails to rain according to your wishes?
Shall I compute the pounds of pennies you will save shopping at bargain
centers? Do you want to know all that? For that is your future, doing
the same small futile things you have done for the past fifty-eight
years. You face a repetition of your past, a recapitulation of the
digits in the adding machine of your days. Save only one bright
numeral, perhaps: there was love of a sort in your past; there is none
in your future."
"Well, I must say, you are the strangest fortuneteller I ever
visited."
"It is my misfortune only to be able to tell the truth."