Full, the rooms were now. A moving bright maze of people and amongst them many strangers, guests. A leaven of the unthinking world, as the Lycurgans were the leaven that was to drive through the world of thought. But the strangers were not the zest of the meeting. Now that they were here, with their bearing of eager curiosity or amused polite deference, being introduced, talked to, some already the centres of arguing groups, it was through the familiar figures that life seemed most strongly to flow. Again as in family life; the quality of the familiar showing clearest under the beam of an alien light.
Densley, hurrying from far away with arms outstretched.
With the sense of coming down through space, that held her still, yet welcoming, with a welcome not for him, but for the strange journeying, his and hers, she reached level in time to rise and greet him as he seized her hands. For a moment he surveyed her through his laugh. Then they were off, arms linked, on a tour of the rooms.
Eyes gleamed at him as he went debonnair, talking, not listening, needing no response but her radiance and abandon to his guiding arm. Solace at once; a rebuilding of strength to face this crowd that now stood off, no longer impinging, no longer eloquent except of a friendly indifference. Life, through all happenings, could pass like this. Happenings would be disarmed, bright strangeness rooted in an unexamined sameness. There would be solace for all the wounds of thought in his unconsciousness. But no companionship. For a long while nothing at all of profound experience and then, perhaps, her whole being arranged round a new centre and reality once more accessible, but in a loneliness beside which the loneliness of the single life was nothing.
He would never know this. A listening radiance and superficial statements and activities would satisfy him. Yet he suspected a rival and respected, while contesting its power. Offered as a substitute his own secret life of faith in human kind, his shining love. For him all these special people gathered here represented not a determined movement to arrest juggernaut, but material for joyous existence.
... Is civilisation juggernaut? Are there not within it as many, and more, of those who promote its best qualities as there are of socialists attacking its defects? And of those like Densley, who work consciously for the increase of human happiness, how many there are and how much kindlier than these people, most of whom seem so little kind, so much merely the jealous custodians of ideas....
“Ideas are such chancy things. We not only can’t get along without them. There’s no escaping them, and they are all figures of speech.”
“Homo sapiens, eh? Well, so long as he has a good figure ...” Kind imbecile, imbecile, but kind. “But ideas, my dear girl, are not the greatest thing in the world. And they easily take one too far away from life.”
“That wouldn’t matter. But while they last they keep you on a monorail. All specialists are on monorails.”
“Monomaniacs, eh? Now tell me who is the lassie in the white smock?”