“’Hapgood, look here.  It’s this.  This is what I’ve found.  You can do the shocking things, and it can be known you do the shocking things.  But you mustn’t be seen doing them.  You can beat your wife, and it can be known among your friends that you beat your wife.  But you mustn’t be seen beating her.  You mustn’t beat her in the street or in your neighbour’s garden.  You can drink, and it can be known you drink; but you mustn’t be seen drunk.

“’Do you see, Hapgood?  Do you see?  The conventions are all right, moral, sound, excellent, admirable, but to save their own face there’s a blind side to them, a shut-eye side.  Keep that side of them and you’re all right.  They’ll let you alone.  They’ll pretend they don’t see you.  But come out and stand in front of them and they’ll devour you.  They’ll smash and grind and devour you, Hapgood.  They’re devouring me.

“’That’s where they’ve got me in their jaws, Hapgood; and where they’ve got Effie in their jaws is just precisely again on a blind, shut-eye side....  They’re rightly based, they’re absolutely just, you can’t gainsay them, but to save their face, again, they’re indomitably blind and deaf to the hideous cruelties in their application.  They mean well.  They cause the most frightful suffering, the most frightful tragedies, but they won’t look at them, they won’t think of them, they won’t speak of them:  they mean well....

“Old Sabre put his head in his hands.  He might have been praying.  He looked to me sort of physically wrestling with what he called the jaws that had got him and had got her.  He looked up at me and he said, ’Hapgood, this is where I’ve got to.  This is where I am.  Hapgood, life’s all wrong, stupid, cruel, blundering, but it means well.  We’ve shaped it to fit us as we think we ought to live and it means well.  Means well!  My God, Hapgood, the most terrible, the most lamentable self-confession that ears can hear—­“I meant well.”  Some frightful blunder committed, some irreparable harm inflicted, and that piteous, heart-broken, heart-breaking, maddening, infuriating excuse, “I meant well.  I meant well.  Why didn’t some one tell me?” Life means well, Hapgood.  It does mean well.  It only wants some one to tell it where it’s going wrong, where it’s blundering, where it’s just missing, and why it’s just missing, all it means to do.’

“With that he went back to all that stuff I told you he told me when I was down with him last month—­that stuff about the need for a new revelation suited to men’s minds to-day, the need for new light.  I can’t tell you all that—­it’s not in my line, that sort of talk.  But he said, his face all pink under his skin, he said, ’Hapgood, I’ll tell you a thing.  I’ve got the secret.  I’ve got the key to the riddle that’s been puzzling me all my life.  I’ve got the new revelation in terms good enough for me to understand.  Light, more light.  Here it is:  God is—­love.  Not this, that, nor the other that the intelligence