lives, if you like, lives which are thoroughly bad--that's the old
and perpetual choice, that has always been--but what is more evident
to me and more remarkable and disconcerting is that there are
nowadays ten thousand muddled lives lacking even so much moral
definition, even so much consistency as is necessary for us to call
them either good or bad, there are planless indeterminate lives,
more and more of them, opening out as the possible lives before us,
a perfect wilderness between salvation and damnation, a wilderness
so vast and crowded that at last it seems as though the way to
either hell or heaven would be lost in its interminable futility.
Such planless indeterminate lives, plebeian lives, mere lives, fill
the world, and the spectacle of whole nations, our whole
civilization, seems to me to re-echo this planlessness, this
indeterminate confusion of purpose. Plain issues are harder and
harder to find, it is as if they had disappeared. Simple living is
the countryman come to town. We are deafened and jostled and
perplexed. There are so many things afoot that we get nothing. . . .

"That is what is in my mind when I tell you that we have to gather
ourselves together much more than we think. We have to clench
ourselves upon a chosen end. We have to gather ourselves together
out of the swill of this brimming world.

"Or--we are lost. . . ."

("Swill of this brimming world," said White. "Some of this sounds
uncommonly like Prothero." He mused for a moment and then resumed
his reading.)

"That is what I was getting at when, three years ago, I made an