. She brought him back now with a jerk.

"No, but what do you think is going to happen?" she asked him.

"I don't know," he answered. "I can't tell, but I know all my happiness
here is coming to an end, and I don't know what I shall do. If I were a
strong man I would go out and find all the other treasure hunters, all
the vicious ones, and the diseased, and the drunkards and the
perverted, and I would try to found some kind of a society so that they
should recognise one another all the world over and shouldn't feel so
lonely and deserted and hopelessly done for. I don't mean a society for
improving them, mind you, or warning them or telling them they'll go to
prison if they don't do better, that's none of my business. But it
seems to be a solemn fact that you aren't a treasure hunter until
there's something wrong with you, until you've got a sin that's
stronger than you are, or until you've done something that's
disgraceful in the eyes of the world--not that I believe in weakness or
in giving way to things. No one admires the strong and the brave more
than I do. I think a man's a fool if he doesn't fight as hard as he
can. But there's a brotherhood of the dissatisfied and the uneasy and
the anxious-hearted, and I believe it's they who will discover the
Grail in the end if it's ever going to be discovered at all."

He broke off, then said restlessly: "I think things out, you know, and
at last I come to a conclusion, and it ends by being a platitude that
all the goody, goody books have said times without number. But all the
same that doesn't prevent it from being my discovery. It's nothing to
do with goodness and nothing to do with evil, it's nothing to do with
strength, and nothing to do with weakness; it simply is that there are
some people who want what they can see and no more, and there are
others, the baffled, fighting and disordered others, for whom nothing
that they can see with their mortal eyes is enough, and who'll be
restless all their days with their queer little maps and their
mysterious, thumbed directions to some island or other that they'll
never reach and never even get a ship for."

He stopped and there was a long silence between them, Maggie was silent
because she never knew what to say when he burst into parables and
divided mankind, under strange names, into different camps. And yet
this time she did know a little what he was after. There was that house
of Katharine Mark's the other day, with its