"I can't help being glad," Maggie answered. "There are such interesting things you might do. I can't imagine why any one writes books now when there are so many already in existence that nobody's read." He wasn't listening to her. He looked up suddenly and said quite wildly: "It's terrible all this that's going on. You know about it, of course--Warlock's visions I mean and the trouble it's making. I'm outside it and you're outside it, but we're being brought into it all the same--how can we help it when we love the people who are in it? It's so easy to say that it's nonsense, that people ought to be wiser nowadays; that it's hysteria, even insanity--I know all that and, of course, I don't believe for a moment that God's coming in a chariot of fire on New Year's Eve especially for the benefit of Thurston, Miss Avies and the rest, but that doesn't end it--it ought to end it, but it doesn't. There's more in some people's madness than in other people's sanity, and anyway, even if it's all nonsense it means life or death to your aunt and some of the others, and it means a certain breaking up of all this place. And it probably means the triumph of a charlatan like Thurston and the increase of humbug in the world and the discouragement of all the honest adventurers. I call myself an adventurer, you know, Miss Maggie, although I'm a poor specimen--but I'm damned if it isn't better to be a poor adventurer than to be a fat, swollen, contented stay-at-home who can see just as far as his nose and his cheque-book and might be just as well dead as alive--I beg your pardon," he added suddenly, "for swearing--I'm not myself, I'm not really." She could see indeed that he was in great agitation of mind, and some of this agitation communicated itself to her. Had she not been selfish in forgetting all this through her own happiness? He was right, she was part of it all, whether she wished or no. "What do you think," she asked, dropping her voice a little, "is the real truth about it?"