"Cassandra, to take a more remote instance, suffered from rapid digestion--in fact, all prophets have the malady. Isn't it physiologically true to say that the unborn child performs in its mother's womb the drama of man's evolution? I'm sure it's equally true that the life of the individual after birth and until death is a microcosm of man's later history, or rather I ought to say that it might be, for only exceptional individuals reproduce the history of humanity up to contemporary development. A genius--a great creative genius--seems to me a man whose active absorption can keep pace with the rapidity of his digestion. How often do we hear of people who were in advance of their time! This figure of speech is literally true, but only great creative geniuses have the consolation of projecting themselves beyond their ambient in time. There remain a number of sterile geniuses, whom Nature, with her usual prodigality, has put on the market in reserve, but for whom later on she finds she has no use on account of the economy that always succeeds extravagance. These sterile geniuses are left to fend for themselves and somehow to extract from a hostile and suspicious environment food to maintain them during the long, dreary emptiness that succeeds their too optimistic absorption. Do you agree with me?" "At one end of the pole you would put Shakespeare, at the other the Jubilee Juggins?" Michael suggested. "That's it," she agreed. "Although a less conspicuous wastrel would serve for the other end." "And I suppose if you're searching for the eternal rhythm of the universe, you'd have to apply to nations the same classification as to individuals?" he went on. "Of course." "So that England would have a good normal digestion and Ireland a too rapid digestion? Or better, let us say that all Teutons eat heartily and digest slowly, and that all Kelts are too rapid. But come back to yourself." Sylvia paused for a moment, and then continued, with swift gestures of self-agreement: "I certainly ascribe every mistake in my own life to a rapid digestion. Why, I've even digested this war that, if we think on a large scale, was evidently designed to stir up the sluggish liver of a world. I'm sick to death of the damned war already, and it hasn't begun yet really. And to come down to my own little particular woes, I've labored toward religion, digested it with horrible rapidity, and see nothing in it now but a half-truth for myself. In art the same, in human associations the same, in everything the same. Ah, don't let's talk any more about anything." In the silence that followed she thought to herself about the inspiration of her late theories; and looking at Michael, pale and hollow-eyed in the grim November dusk, she railed at herself because with all her will to make use of the quality she had attributed to herself she could not shake off this love that was growing every day.