"Well, you're married and I'm not, but it isn't a bit of good screaming about marriage unless your own marriage is straightened out and,--you know what I mean?--understood, is it? . . ." So he would go on, whirling from one topic to another--marriage, morals, democracy, the will to power,--thinking in sharp contrasts, sometimes hardly thinking, but feeling always. Vaguely, without objects, catching himself out in some detestable sentimentality, admitting it frankly and going back again over his whole argument to pluck it out. Panoukian was to himself a weedy field, and with bowed back and stiffened loins he was engrossed in stubbing it. It was exhausting to watch him at it, and when, as sometimes happened, Old Mole saw things through Panoukian's eyes he was disquieted. Then there seemed no security in existence; civilization was no longer an achievement, but a fluid stream flowing over a varied bed--rock, pebbles, mud, sand; society was no establishment, but a precarious, tottering thing, a tower of silted sands with an oozy base, blocking the river, squeezing it into a narrow and unpleasant channel. In the nature of things and its law the river would one day gather unto itself great waters and bear the sands away. . . . Meanwhile men strove to make the sand heap habitable, for they were born on it, lived and died on it, and never looked beyond. Their whole lives were filled with dread of its crumbling, their whole energies devoted to building up against it and against the action of wind and rain and sun. They built themselves in and looked not out, and made their laws by no authority but only by expediency. And the young men, in their vitality too great for such confinement, knew that somewhere there must be firm ground, and were determined to excavate and to explore. And Old Mole wished them well in the person of Panoukian.