"I suppose none of us sees more than we have our eyes open to. Things of the greatest importance to us happen, and we don't know that they're going on."
"I hope that that kind of song and dance isn't going on—the breakdown of our civilization. It wasn't for that we gave 'em hell at Château-Thierry."
"Oh, none of us knows what anything is for, except in the vaguest way. All we can do is to plod ahead and follow the thread of flame."
"Follow the thread of what?"
I was sufficiently master of myself to indulge in a mild laugh.
"That's just an expression that's been in my mind during the time when I've been—been floundering about. Name I invented for—for a principle."
In this, however, he was not interested.
"Yes, but your collapsing house—"
"It may not come down altogether. I'm neither a prophet nor a prophet's son. All I can see is what I suppose everybody sees, that our civilization has been rotten. It couldn't hold together. It hadn't the cohesive strength. Perhaps I was wrong in saying that it was falling down; it's more as if we were pulling it down, to build up something better. It's our blind instinct toward perfection—"
But refusing to listen to any more, he got up to go. A brave man in the presence of enemies of flesh and blood, intellectual foes frightened him. At the first sound of their shells he rushed for his mental dugout which he burrowed in the ground of denial. "I don't believe that" and "All tommyrot" seemed to him shelters from any kind of danger.