A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping

By certain scientific thinkers life is held to be but a relative term, and the "definitions" of the ancients have been cast aside into the very dust that they despised as gross and utterly inanimate. Whether radium be "alive" or no, the thing we ordinary mortals know as "life" shows even in its social aspects a significant sympathy with the Spencerian definition. The successful men are those who react and respond most readily, and most selfishly to the externals of existence. Vulgarly, we call it the seizing of opportunities, though the clever merchant may react almost unconsciously and yet instinctively to the market of the public mind. All life is an adjustment of relationships, of husband to wife, of mother to child, of cheat to dupe, of capital to labor.

Thus, in social death, so to speak, a man may be so placed that he is unable to adapt himself to his surroundings. His reputation dies and disintegrates like a body that is incapable of adjusting itself to some blighting change of climate. Or, in the terminology of physics, responsible repute may be likened to an obelisk whose instability increases with its height. A flat stone may remain in respectable and undisturbed equilibrium for centuries. The poised pinnacle is pressed upon by every wind that blows.