ersonalities. For
us, a complete holiday is out of the question. Some of us struggle
manfully to take one, but we never succeed, if I may be allowed to
express myself metaphorically, we never succeed in getting farther than
Southend."

"You're depressing," said Anne.

"I mean to be," Mr. Scogan replied, and, expanding the fingers of his
right hand, he went on: "Look at me, for example. What sort of a holiday
can I take? In endowing me with passions and faculties Nature has been
horribly niggardly. The full range of human potentialities is in
any case distressingly limited; my range is a limitation within a
limitation. Out of the ten octaves that make up the human instrument,
I can compass perhaps two. Thus, while I may have a certain amount
of intelligence, I have no aesthetic sense; while I possess the
mathematical faculty, I am wholly without the religious emotions; while
I am naturally addicted to venery, I have little ambition and am not
at all avaricious. Education has further limited my scope. Having been
brought up in society, I am impregnated with its laws; not only should
I be afraid of taking a holiday from them, I should also feel it painful
to try to do so. In a word, I have a conscience as well as a fear of
gaol. Yes, I know it by experience. How often have I tried to take
holidays, to get away from myself, my own boring nature, my insufferable
mental surroundings!" Mr. Scogan sighed. "But always without
success," he added, "always without success. In my youth I was always
striving--how hard!--to feel religiously and aesthetically. Here, said
I to myself, are two tremendously important and exciting emotions. Life
would be richer, warmer, brighter, altogether more amusing, if I could
feel them. I try to feel them. I read the works of the mystics. They
seemed to me nothing but the most deplorable claptrap--as indeed they
always must to anyone who does not feel the same emotion as the authors
felt when they were writing. For it is the emotion that matters. The
written work is simply an attempt to express emotion, which is in itself
inexpressible, in terms of intellect and logic. The mystic objectifies
a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach into a cosmology. For other
mystics that cosmology is a symbol of the rich feeling. For the
unreligious it is a symbol of nothing, and so appears merely grotesque.
A melancholy fact! But I divagate." Mr. Scogan checked himself. "So much
for the religious emotion. As for