t of
tinkering with matrimonial law in the next few years, of petty tinkering
that would abolish a few pretences and give ease to a few amiable
people, but if he were to come back to life a thousand years hence he
felt he would still find the ancient gigantic barrier, crossed perhaps
by a dangerous road, pierced perhaps by a narrow tunnel or so, but in
all its great essentials the same, between himself and Lady Harman. It
wasn't that it was rational, it wasn't that it was justifiable, but it
was one with the blood in one's veins and the rain-cloud in the sky, a
necessity in the nature of present things. Before mankind emerged from
the valley of these restraints--if ever they did emerge--thousands of
generations must follow one another, there must be tens of thousands of
years of struggle and thought and trial, in the teeth of prevalent habit
and opinion--and primordial instincts. A new humanity....

His heart sank to hopelessness.

Meanwhile? Meanwhile we had to live our lives.

He began to see a certain justification for the hidden cults that run
beneath the fair appearances of life, those social secrecies by which
people--how could one put it?--people who do not agree with established
institutions, people, at any rate not merely egoistic and jealous as the
crowd is egoistic and jealous, hide and help one another to mitigate the
inflexible austerities of the great unreason.

Yes, Mr. Brumley had got to a phrase of that quality for the
undiscriminating imperatives of the fundamental social institution. You
see how a particular situation may undermine the assumptions of a mind
originally devoted to uncritical acceptances. He still insisted it was a
necessary great unreason, absolutely necessary--for the mass of people,
a part of them, a natural expression of them, but he could imagine the
possibility--of 'understandings.' ... Mr. Brumley was very vague about
those understandings, those mysteries of the exalted that were to filch
happiness from the destroying grasp of the crude and jealous. He had to
be vague. For secret and noble are ideas like oil and water; you may
fling them together with all the force of your will but in a little
while they will separate again.

For a time this dream of an impossible secrecy was uppermost in Mr.
Brumley's meditations. It came into his head with the effect of a
discovery that always among the unclimbable barriers of this supreme
institution there had been,--caves. He had been rea