"Each man is saturated with certain ideas, thoughts, phrases in a line of his own. These constitute his groove. To go outside it makes him feel homeless and uncomfortable. Accustomed to its measurements and safe within them, he interprets all he hears, reads, observes, according to his particular familiar shibboleths, to which, as to a standard of infallible criticism, he brings slavishly all that is offered for the consideration of his judgment. A new Idea stands little chance of being comprehended, much less adopted. Tell him new things about the stars, the Stock Exchange, the Stigmata—up crops his Standard of approval or disapproval. He cannot help himself. His judgment, based upon the limited content of his groove, operates automatically. He condemns. An entirely new idea is barely glanced at before it is rejected for the rubbish heap. How, then, can progress come swiftly to a Race composed of such individuals? Mass-judgment, herd-opinion governs everything. He who has original ideas is outcast, and dwells lonely as the moon. How slow, ye Gods! How slow!" ...
Only Fillery could not remember, could not be certain, whether it was his host or himself that used the words. Father Collins, as usual, was saying "all sorts of things," but addressed himself surely, to old Khilkoff most of the time, the Russian, half angry, half amused, growling out his comments and replies as he sat smoking heavily and enjoying the peaceful night scene in his own fashion....
It was odd, none the less, how much that the wild priest gabbled coincided with his own, with Fillery's, thoughts at the moment. A peculiar melancholy, a mood of shyness never known before, lay still upon him. The beauty of the silent girl beside him overpowered him a little; too wonderful to hold, to own, she seemed. Yet they were deliciously, uncannily akin. All his former self-created denials and suppressions, hesitations and refusals had vanished. "N. H."—He wondered?—had provided him with the fullest expression he had ever known. A boundless relief poured over him. He was aware of wholesome desire rising behind his old high admiration and respect....
He watched her once standing close to Pan's broken outline among the shadows, touching the mossy arm with white fingers, and he imagined for an instant that she held the vanished pipes.
"After an experience with Other Beings," Father Collins's endless drone floated to him, "shyness, they say, is felt. Silence descends upon the whole nature" ... to which, a little later, came the growling comment with its foreign accent: "Talk may be pleasurable—sometimes—but it is profitable rarely...."
The talk flowed past and over him, occasional phrases, like islands rising out of a stream, inviting his attention momentarily to land and listen.... The girl, he now saw, no longer stood beside the broken stone figure. She was wandering idly towards the farther garden and the trees.
He burned to rise and go to her, but something held him. What was it? What could it be? Some strange hard little obstacle prevented. Then, suddenly, he knew what it was that stopped him: he was waiting for that familiar pet sentence. Once he heard that, the impetus to move, the power to overcome his strange shyness, the certainty that his whole being was at last one with itself again, would come to him. It made him laugh inwardly while he recognized the validity of the detail—final symptoms of the obstructing inhibitions, of the obstinate original complex.
The outline of the girl was lost now, merged in the shadows beyond. He stirred, but could not get up to go. A fury of impatience burned in him. Father Collins, he felt, dawdled outrageously. He was talking—jawing, Fillery called it—about extraordinary experiences. "Gradually, as consciousness more and more often extends, the organs to record such extensions will be formed, you see.... If our inventive faculties were turned inwards, instead of outwards for gain and comfort as they now are, we might know the gods...."
The sculptor's growl, though the words were this time inaudible, had a bite in them. The other voice poured on like thick, slow oil:
"What, anyhow, is it, then, that urges us on in spite of all obstacles, denials, failures...?"