"That's it. That's it. Now mark what I'm going to tell you. On the walls of my cell were drawings and writings--horrible drawings of women, lewd verses, and hysterical outbursts in the name of Jesus Christ. They were conventional, I admit, but that only makes it all the worse. It means that men are imprisoned in their own minds, debarred from woman on the one hand and from God on the other. You may tell me that my cell has been occupied only by lowest types, but if the Prince of Wales were to be incarcerated in it he would in time add to the collection of bawdy rhymes, and if he were followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury there would be one more such inscription as: 'Christ died to save me and the magistrate.' Some men are reduced to filthiness, some to hysteria, some to both. For the superficial and trivial purposes of existence such as the day's work, marriage, family duties, the so-called pleasures of society, they contrive to cover up their deplorable condition. Within themselves they are reduced to the most devastating loneliness. In their day-to-day prison of Society they do not write their thoughts on the walls (except for an occasional jubilant outburst over the successful issue of an amorous adventure), and it has remained for me to find in an actual acknowledged prison the frank revelation of the state of the human mind. . . . It has always been so. . . . Britons never shall be slaves indeed! They never have been, never will be, anything else." Serge quoted: "L'inconvénient du règne de l'opinion, c'est qu'elle se mêle à ce dont elle n'a que faire; par exemple, la vie privée. De là la tristesse de l'Amérique et de l'Angleterre." "Aye," said the old man. "And what would the man that wrote that say if he could see our town and all the other towns, the rusty links in the world-wide thing the men of our time are so pleased to call industrialism? Men make everything in their own image. If you want to know what men are look at their towns, look at their houses, look at their books, their art. . . . At first, being human, ye'll be dazzled and pleased by the conceit and egoism that have gone to the making of them, but soon beneath the conceit and the egoism ye'll find nothing but fear--fear of death, fear of love; appeals to Jesus Christ from the one, abuse of women by way of escape from the other. Fools and blind! There's no escape. There's no good life but in the honest meeting of the one and the other. . . ." "And women?" asked Serge.