he could conceive them distributing alms to the needy after
careful and scientific enquiry, administering justice; he could
imagine them even, with an effort, inflamed with political
passion, denouncing, appealing. . . . But it appeared to him (to
his imagination rather, as he angrily told himself) that he
could not believe them capable of any absolutely reckless crime
or reckless act of virtue. They could calculate, they could
plan, they had almost mechanically perfect ideas of justice;
they could even love and hate after their kind. But it was
inconceivable that their passion, either for good or evil, could
wholly carry them away. In one word, _there was no light behind
these faces_, no indication of an incomprehensible Power greater
than themselves, no ideal higher than that generated by the
common sense of the multitude. In short, they seemed to him to
have all the impassivity of the Christian atmosphere, with none
of its hidden fire.

He gave the signal presently for the driver to move on, and
himself leaned back in his seat with closed eyes. He felt
terribly alone in a terrible world. Was the whole human race,
then, utterly without heart? Had civilization reached such a
pitch of perfection--one part through supernatural forces, and
the other through human evolution--that there was no longer any
room for a man with feelings and emotions and an individuality of
his own? Yet he could no longer conceal from himself that the
other was better than this--that it was better to be heartless
through too vivid a grasp of eternal realities, than through an
equally vivid grasp of earthly facts.

* * * * *