“I never thought of it until now. But he's— How did I know he was the sort of man a disciplined world has a use for?”
He makes no answer, but he looks at me with eyes that are positively baleful, and in the instant I read his mute but mulish resolve that Utopia must end.
“Don't let that old quarrel poison all this,” I say almost entreatingly. “It happened all differently here—everything is different here. Your double will be back to-morrow. Wait for him. Perhaps then you will understand—”
He shakes his head, and then bursts out with, “What do I want with a double? Double! What do I care if things have been different here? This—”
He thrusts me weakly back with his long, white hand. “My God!” he says almost forcibly, “what nonsense all this is! All these dreams! All Utopias! There she is—! Oh, but I have dreamt of her! And now—”
A sob catches him. I am really frightened by this time. I still try to keep between him and these Utopians, and to hide his gestures from them.
“It's different here,” I persist. “It's different here. The emotion you feel has no place in it. It's a scar from the earth—the sore scar of your past—”
“And what are we all but scars? What is life but a scarring? It's you—you who don't understand! Of course we are covered with scars, we live to be scarred, we are scars! We are the scars of the past! These dreams, these childish dreams—!”
He does not need to finish his sentence, he waves an unteachable destructive arm.
My Utopia rocks about me.