rcled it. There would be fewer people there; fewer
minds crowded together, making a dense atmosphere that was impervious to
the piercing, however sharp, of truth. All this dense mass of stupid,
muddled, huddled minds.... What was to be done with it? Greedy minds,
ignorant minds, sentimental, truthless minds....

He saw, as he passed a newspaper stand, placards in big black
letters--'Bride's Suicide.' 'Divorce of Baronet.' Then, small and
inconspicuous, hardly hoping for attention, 'Italy and the Adriatic.' For
one person who would care about Italy and the Adriatic, there would,
presumably, be a hundred who would care about the bride and the baronet.
Presumably; else why the placards? Gideon honestly tried to bend his
impersonal and political mind to understand it. He knew no such people,
yet one had to believe they existed; people who really cared that a bride
with whom they had no acquaintance (why a bride? Did that make her more
interesting?) had taken her life; and that a baronet (also a perfect
stranger) had had his marriage dissolved in a court of law. What quality
did it indicate, this curious and inexplicable interest in these topics
so tedious to himself and to most of his personal acquaintances? Was it a
love of romance? But what romance was to be found in suicide or divorce?
Romance Gideon knew; knew how it girdled the world, heard the beat of its
steps in far forests, the whisper of its wings on dark seas.... It is
there, not in divorces and suicides. Were people perhaps moved by desire
to hear about the misfortunes of others? No, because they also welcomed
with eagerness the more cheerful domestic episodes reported. Was it,
then, some fundamental, elemental interest in fundamental things, such as
love, hate, birth, death? That was possibly it. The relation of states
one with another are the product of civilisation, and need an at least
rudimentarily political brain to grasp them. The relations of human
beings are natural, and only need the human heart for their
understanding. That part of man's mind which has been, for some obscure
reason, inaccurately called the heart, was enormously and
disproportionately stronger than the rest of the mind, the thinking part.

'Light Caught Bending,' another placard remarked. That was more cheerful,
though it was an idiotic way of putting a theory as to the curvature of
space, but it was refreshing that, apparently, people were expected to be
excited by that too. And, Gide