"Grant me what?" she cried, startled beyond measure to hear herself addressed. "Grant you that it is rather absurd to go hunting a lynx. And what big paws it has--disproportionately big! I wonder if that's an adaptation to snow. Tremendous paws they are.... But the real thing, I was saying, the real thing is to get knowledge, and express it. All things lead up to that. Civilization, social order, just for that. Except for that, all the life of man, all his affairs, his laws and police, his morals and manners--nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. Lynx hunts! Just ways of getting themselves mauled and clawed perhaps--into a state of understanding. Who knows?..." His voice became low and clear. "Understanding spreading like a dawn.... "Logic and language, clumsy implements, but rising to our needs, rising to our needs, thought clarified, enriched, reaching out to every man alive--some day--presently--touching every man alive, harmonizing acts and plans, drawing men into gigantic co-operations, tremendous co-operations.... "Until man shall stand upon this earth as upon a footstool and reach out his hand among the stars.... "And then I went into the rubber market, and spent seven years of my life driving shares up and down and into a net!... Queer game indeed! Stupid ass Behrens was--at bottom.... "There's a flaw in it somewhere...." He came back to that several times before he seemed able to go on from it. "There _is_ a collective mind," he said, "a growing general consciousness--growing clearer. Something put me away from that, but I know it. My work, my thinking, was a part of it. That's why I was so mad about Behrens." "Behrens?" "Of course. He'd got a twist, a wrong twist. It makes me angry now. It will take years, it will eat up some brilliant man to clean up after Behrens----" "Yes, but the point is"--his voice became acute--"why did I go making money and let Behrens in? Why generally and in all sorts of things does Behrens come in?..." He was silent for a long time, and then he began to answer himself. "Of course," he said, "I said it--or somebody said it--about this collective mind being mixed with other things. It's something arising out of life--not the common stuff of life. An exhalation.... It's like the little tongues of fire that came at Pentecost.... Queer how one comes drifting back to these images. Perhaps I shall die a Christian yet.... The other Christians won't like me if I do. What was I saying?... It's what I reach up to, what I desire shall pervade me, not what I am. Just as far as I give myself purely to knowledge, to making feeling and thought clear in my mind and words, to the understanding and expression of the realities and relations of life, just so far do I achieve Salvation.... Salvation!...