"Will you stop that? God damn it, will you stop that?" you yell at him.
Ian looks at you owlishly for a few seconds and then back at his drink. Jones-Very and the others go right on with the conversation.
"It's merely what I was saying the other night," Jones-Very says. "It's the contagious spread of the madness that is epidemic in our time. No one wants war. But still we are going to have a war. After all, the very zeitgeist of our times is one of complete callousness toward human life. You have only to think of the Russian slave camps, the German gas chambers and our own highway slaughter."
"Maybe life itself is just some sort of stupid mistake," Anna says. "Maybe we're a cosmic blunder, a few pimples on the tail of the universe."
"That isn't so," you blurt out. "There's purpose—there's got to be purpose. You can't look around you and say there isn't purpose in the universe; that there isn't a reason for our being here."
This time they all turn and look at you strangely. Then they look at each other.
"I wonder," Jones-Very says, "if I wasn't closer to the truth than I thought when I talked about contagion."
"What the hell do you mean by that?" you demand, half rising from your seat.
"Nothing ... nothing at all," Jones-Very says, looking at the others.
"What this world needs is a moral renovation—a new birth of the spirit," you go on.