e, hidden orthodoxy, who would accept
for themselves only what could be accepted for all men--incurable
romanticists who never, for all their efforts, could enter the labyrinth
as stark souls; there were on the other hand sword-like pioneering
personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire, who progressed much
slower, yet eventually much further, not in the direct pessimistic line
of speculative philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach
a positive value to life....

Amory stopped. He began for the first time in his life to have a strong
distrust of all generalities and epigrams. They were too easy, too
dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually reached the
public after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had
popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had sugar-coated Nietzsche and
Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions
of dead genius through some one else's clever paradoxes and didactic
epigrams.

Life was a damned muddle... a football game with every one off-side and
the referee gotten rid of--every one claiming the referee would have
been on his side....

Progress was a labyrinth... people plunging blindly in and then rushing
wildly back, shouting that they had found it... the invisible king--the
elan vital--the principle of evolution... writing a book, starting a
war, founding a school....

Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all
inquiries with himself. He was his own best example--sitting in the
rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own
temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in
building up the living consciousness of the race.

In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance
of the labyrinth.

*****

Another dawn flung itself across the river, a belated taxi hurried along
the street, its lamps still shining like burning eyes in a face white
from a night's carouse. A melancholy siren sounded far down the river.

*****

MONSIGNOR

Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own funeral.
It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical. Bishop O'Neill sang solemn
high mass and the cardinal gave the final absolutions. Thornton Hancock,
Mrs. Lawrence, the British and Italian ambassadors, the papal delegate,
and a host of friends and priests were there--yet the inexorable shears
had cut through all these threads