of society, his hatred of
Christian civilisation and Christian ethics, his love of the big
forcible blonde who takes his right by his strength only, all this was
congenial to Terry's character, and especially so after the weakening of
his social philosophy. The aloofness of the Overman, the individualistic
teachings of Zarathustra, appealed to the anti-social Terry, to the man
who more and more went back to his egotistic personality, to whom more
and more the "communist" Christian anarchists made little appeal, who
more and more became what is called an individualist anarchist, with
whom there is little possibility of relationship, who is essentially
anti-social, whose philosophy is really that of social destruction. This
indeed is the anarchist who lives in the public mind--a destroyer. But
what the public mind does not see is that this destructive anarchist is
the result of a lost hope in anarchistic communism, a lost hope of
radical extension of social love, in absolute solidarity.

CHAPTER XIV

_Marie's Revolt_

"The winners fall by the wayside," wrote Terry, "while the losers must
ever on--hearkening to some high request, hastening toward a nameless
goal. I am loser, for my motives are large and my actions small. In my
desire to embrace the universe I may neglect a comrade. I can be as hard
as my life and as cruel as its finish. I have only an ideal, and
whenever anything or anybody gets in the way of it I am ruthless in
feeling. I must not give up all that I have--what is in my imagination:
I have nothing else."

Yes, Terry is hard. He "passes up" remorselessly not only the
individual, but all society; but it is the hardness of the idealist, of
the man who is still religious in the sense that he sees a beyond-world
with which to compare this world and find it totally lacking. So, more
and more he "passed up" Marie, found her more and more lacking, more and
more human. The fact of her being a social outcast no longer had its
strong appeal. He became hard and cruel to her through idealism, just as
she had been hard and cruel to him through sensuality and false
philosophy. But her hardness never equalled his fine scorn.

For a year or two preceding this point in the situation I had been
living in Europe, and had met a good many men and women who had given a
larger part of their lives to the making of a social experiment. Some of
them, discouraged, had returned to a "bourgeois" manner of life, some
even