'Why do we, every one of us, refute the experience of others, preferring to gain our own? Why do we fight against government? why do I want to be independent of my father? or the Islands independent of Herakleion? or Herakleion independent of Greece? What's this instinct of wanting to stand alone, to be oneself, isolated, free, individual? Why does instinct push us towards individualism, when the great wellbeing of mankind probably lies in solidarity? when the social system in its most elementary form starts with men clubbing together for comfort and greater safety? No sooner have we achieved our solidarity, our hierarchy, our social system, our civilisation, than we want to get away from it. A vicious circle; the wheel revolves, and brings us back to the same point from which we started.' 'Yes,' said Kato, 'there is certainly an obscure sympathy with the rebel, that lies somewhere dormant in the soul of the most platitudinous advocate of law and order.' She was amused by his generalisations, and was clever enough not to force him back too abruptly to the matter she had in mind. She thought him ludicrously, though rather touchingly, young, both in his ideas and his phraseology; but at the same time she shrewdly discerned the force which was in him and which she meant to use for her own ends. 'You,' she said to him, 'will argue in favour of society, yet you will spend your life, or at any rate your youth, in revolt against it. Youth dies, you see, when one ceases to rebel. Besides,' she added, scrutinising him, 'the time will very soon come when you cease to argue and begin to act. Believe me, one soon discards one's wider examinations, and learns to content oneself with the practical business of the moment. One's own bit of the mosaic, as you said.' He felt wholesomely sobered, but not reproved; he liked Kato's penetration, her vivid, intelligent sympathy, and her point of view which was practical without being cynical. 'I have come to one real conclusion,' he said, 'which is, that pain alone is intrinsically evil, and that in the lightening or abolition of pain one is safe in going straight ahead; it is a bit of the mosaic worth doing. So in the Islands....' he paused. Kato repressed a smile; she was more and more touched and entertained by his youthful, dogmatic statements, which were delivered with a concentration and an ardour that utterly disarmed derision. She was flattered, too, by his unthinking confidence in her; for she knew him by report as morose and uncommunicative, with relapses into rough high spirits and a schoolboy sense of farce. Eve had described him as inaccessible.... 'When you go, as you say, straight ahead,' he resumed, frowning, his eyes absent. Kato began to dwell, very skilfully, upon the topic of the Islands....