mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

Women--of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to
transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvellously
incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of
experience--had become merely consecrations to their own posterity.
Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all removed by their
very beauty, around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of
contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to
write.

Amory based his loss of faith in help from others on several sweeping
syllogisms. Granted that his generation, however bruised and decimated
from this Victorian war, were the heirs of progress. Waving aside petty
differences of conclusions which, although they might occasionally
cause the deaths of several millions of young men, might be explained
away--supposing that after all Bernard Shaw and Bernhardi, Bonar Law
and Bethmann-Hollweg were mutual heirs of progress if only in agreeing
against the ducking of witches--waiving the antitheses and approaching
individually these men who seemed to be the leaders, he was repelled by
the discrepancies and contradictions in the men themselves.

There was, for example, Thornton Hancock, respected by half the
intellectual world as an authority on life, a man who had verified and
believed the code he lived by, an educator of educators, an adviser to
Presidents--yet Amory knew that this man had, in his heart, leaned on
the priest of another religion.

And Monsignor, upon whom a cardinal rested, had moments of strange and
horrible insecurity--inexplicable in a religion that explained even
disbelief in terms of its own faith: if you doubted the devil it was the
devil that made you doubt him. Amory had seen Monsignor go to the houses
of stolid philistines, read popular novels furiously, saturate himself
in routine, to escape from that horror.

And this priest, a little wiser, somewhat purer, had been, Amory knew,
not essentially older than he.

Amory was alone--he had escaped from a small enclosure into a great
labyrinth. He was where Goethe was when he began "Faust"; he was where
Conrad was when he wrote "Almayer's Folly."

Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people
who through natural clarity or disillusion left the enclosure and
sought the labyrinth. There were men like Wells and Plato, who had,
half unconsciously, a strang