himself for a superior being—superior not in the sense against which he had chafed as a boy, when Mrs. Kestrell placed before him her finest linen, but superior in his comprehension of the infinite insignificance of himself and of all men as individuals, in the puissant totality of life. With flushed cheeks and shining eyes he seized the reins of discourse and drove it furiously, increasing the pace as each man and woman showed signs of catching up.
In the background he saw the proprietor rubbing his hands.
Paul found himself talking of the soul, of its arduous journey through the valley of the shadow, of its imprisonment in the body and its subjection to a mind which sought to argue it out of existence, of its incessant struggle for liberation, encouraged by a presence merely felt, as a brushing of wings, or merely glimpsed in flashes of celestial light, of its ultimate emancipation at death. He deprecated the unnecessary strife within the trinity: soul, mind and body. His plea was for order, co-ordination, poise, harmony. Religion, he said, any sort of religion, even that of maniacal evangelists, was an essential part of life, necessary as a sort of tuning-fork that gave human beings the right "pitch," according to which they might live without flatting.
Then the talk swerved round to the topic on which he was known to have expressed views that savoured of a past bitterness. Never had his conviction that national barriers were a heritage from barbarous days, that the progress of civilization depended on a pooling of human interests, been so succinctly, so vehemently and inspiringly set forth. "La parole est à Orphée," cried Philippe Bloch, who sought to maintain a sort of parliamentary procedure in these discussions. "Orpheus" was a nickname conferred on Paul in jest by his acknowledged disciple, George Paddon, and it had caught.
