? Do you see? The conventions are all right, moral,
sound, excellent, admirable, but to save their own face there's a blind
side to them, a shut-eye side. Keep that side of them and you're all
right. They'll let you alone. They'll pretend they don't see you. But
come out and stand in front of them and they'll devour you. They'll
smash and grind and devour you, Hapgood. They're devouring me.

"'That's where they've got me in their jaws, Hapgood; and where they've
got Effie in their jaws is just precisely again on a blind, shut-eye
side.... They're rightly based, they're absolutely just, you can't
gainsay them, but to save their face, again, they're indomitably blind
and deaf to the hideous cruelties in their application. They mean well.
They cause the most frightful suffering, the most frightful tragedies,
but they won't look at them, they won't think of them, they won't speak
of them: they mean well....

"Old Sabre put his head in his hands. He might have been praying. He
looked to me sort of physically wrestling with what he called the jaws
that had got him and had got her. He looked up at me and he said,
'Hapgood, this is where I've got to. This is where I am. Hapgood, life's
all wrong, stupid, cruel, blundering, but it means well. We've shaped it
to fit us as we think we ought to live and it means well. Means well! My
God, Hapgood, the most terrible, the most lamentable self-confession
that ears can hear--"I meant well." Some frightful blunder committed,
some irreparable harm inflicted, and that piteous, heart-broken,
heart-breaking, maddening, infuriating excuse, "I meant well. I meant
well. Why didn't some one tell me?" Life means well, Hapgood. It does
mean well. It only wants some one to tell it where it's going wrong,
where it's blundering, where it's just missing, and why it's just
missing, all it means to do.'

"With that he went back to all that stuff I told you he told me when I
was down with him last month--that stuff about the need for a new
revelation suited to men's minds to-day, the need for new light. I can't
tell you all that--it's not in my line, that sort of talk. But he said,
his face all pink under his skin, he said, 'Hapgood, I'll tell you a
thing. I've got the secret. I've got the key to the riddle that's been
puzzling me all my life. I've got the new revelation in terms good
enough for me to understand. Light, more light. Here it is: God
is--_love_. Not this, that, nor the other that the inte