Malice is always lucky. - Stefan Zweig

And I said to myself: From now on help anyone and everyone so far as it lies within your power. Cease to be apathetic, indifferent! Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone's destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity. And my heart, astonished at its own workings, quivered with gratitude to the sick girl whom I had hurt unwittingly and who, through her suffering, had taught me the creative magic of pity.

Ever since the war he's had a low opinion of people and of nations, they're selfish, all of them, without the imagination to see the injustices they're perpetrating. The idealism of his youth, a belief in the moral mission of mankind and the enlightened spirit of the white race that he took from the lectures of John Stuart Mill and his followers, was buried once and for all in the bloody mire of Ypres and the chalk quarry at Soissons where his son met his death. Politics disgusts him, the cool conviviality of the club and the showy self-congratulation of the public banquet repel him; since the death of his son he's avoided making new acquaintances. His own generation's sour unwillingness to recognize the truth and its inability to adapt to the postwar era anger him, as does the younger generation's smart-alecky thoughtlessness. But with this girl he's regained belief, a vague devout gratitude for the mere existence of youth; in her presence he sees that one generation's painfully acquired mistrust of life is fortunately neither understood nor credited by the next, and that each new wave of youth is a new beginning.

He looked at her again, now with the vague abject shyness that older men often have with young women, as though asking their indulgence for no longer being young.