cross this little world. The more
we hurry, the more we read. Night and noon and morning the panorama
passes before our eyes. By tables, on cars, and in the street we see
them--readers, readers everywhere, drinking their blindness in. Life is
a blur of printed paper. We see no more the things themselves. We see
about them. We lose the power to see the things themselves. We see in
sentences. The linotype looks for us. We know the world in columns. The
sounds of the street are muffled to us. In papers up to our ears, we
whirl along our endless tracks. The faces that pass are phantoms. In our
little woodcut head-line dream we go ceaseless on, turning leaves,--days
and weeks and months of leaves,--wherever we go--years of leaves. Boys
who never have seen the sky above them, young men who have never seen it
in a face, old men who have never looked out at sea across a crowd, nor
guessed the horizons there--dead men, the flicker of life in their
hands, not yet beneath the roofs of graves--all turning leaves."

The Mysterious Person stopped. Nobody said anything. It is the better
way, generally, with The Mysterious Person. We were beginning to feel as
if he were through, when his eye fell on a copy of The ----, lying on
the floor. It was open at an unlucky page.

"Look at that!" said he. He handed the paper to The P. G. S. of M.,
pointing with his finger, rather excitedly. The P. G. S. of M. looked at
it--read it through. Then he put it down; The Mysterious Person went on.

"Do you not know what it means when you, a civilised, cultivated,
converted human being, can stand face to face with a list--a list like
that--a list headed 'BOOKS OF THE WEEK'--when, unblinking and shameless,
and without a cry of protest, you actually read it through, without
seeing, or seeming to see, for a single moment that right there--right
there in that list--the fact that there is such a list--your
civilisation is on trial for its life--that any society or nation or
century that is shallow enough to publish as many books as that has yet
to face the most awful, the most unprecedented, the most headlong-coming
crisis in the history of the human race?"

The Mysterious Person made a pause--the pause of settling things. [There
are people who seem to think that the only really adequate way to settle
a thing, in this world, is for them to ask a question about it.]

At all events The Mysterious Person having asked a question at this
point, everybody migh