eir various manners of
spitting, and the cries of the victim from the hall of justice within.
When the crowd dispersed, Eeldrop and Appleplex returned to their rooms:
Appleplex entered the results of his inquiries into large notebooks,
filed according to the nature of the case, from A (adultery) to Y
(yeggmen). Eeldrop smoked reflectively. It may be added that Eeldrop was
a sceptic, with a taste for mysticism, and Appleplex a materialist with
a leaning toward scepticism; that Eeldrop was learned in theology, and
that Appleplex studied the physical and biological sciences.

There was a common motive which led Eeldrop and Appleplex thus to
separate themselves from time to time, from the fields of their
daily employments and their ordinarily social activities. Both were
endeavoring to escape not the commonplace, respectable or even the
domestic, but the too well pigeonholed, too taken-for-granted, too
highly systematized areas, and,--in the language of those whom they
sought to avoid--they wished "to apprehend the human soul in its
concrete individuality."

"Why," said Eeldrop, "was that fat Spaniard, who sat at the table
with us this evening, and listened to our conversation with occasional
curiosity, why was he himself for a moment an object of interest to us?
He wore his napkin tucked into his chin, he made unpleasant noises while
eating, and while not eating, his way of crumbling bread between fat
fingers made me extremely nervous: he wore a waistcoat cafe au lait, and
black boots with brown tops. He was oppressively gross and vulgar;
he belonged to a type, he could easily be classified in any town
of provincial Spain. Yet under the circumstances--when we had been
discussing marriage, and he suddenly leaned forward and exclaimed:
'I was married once myself'--we were able to detach him from his
classification and regard him for a moment as an unique being, a soul,
however insignificant, with a history of its own, once for all. It is
these moments which we prize, and which alone are revealing. For any
vital truth is incapable of being applied to another case: the essential
is unique. Perhaps that is why it is so neglected: because it is
useless. What we learned about that Spaniard is incapable of being
applied to any other Spaniard, or even recalled in words. With the
decline of orthodox theology and its admirable theory of the soul, the
unique importance of events has vanished. A man is only important as he
is classed