about till he came, smiling at her ignorance of them, and declaring the ignorance to be the best testimony … that was it; he gave her her nationality and surroundings, the fact of being England to him made everything easy. There was no need to do or be anything, individual. It was too easy. It must be demoralising … just sitting there basking in being English. … Everything she did, everything that came to her in the outside world turned out to be demoralising … too easy … some fraud in it. … But the pity she found herself suddenly feeling for all English people who had not intelligent foreign friends gave her courage to go on. Meanwhile there was an unsettled troublesome point. Something that could not be left.
“Perhaps,” she said, “I daresay. But at any rate, I have an open mind. Do you think that the race is sacred , and has purposes, superman you know what I mean, Nietzsche, and that individuals are fitted up with the instincts that keep them going, just to blind them to the fact that they don’t matter?”
“If one must use these terms, the race is certainly more sacred than the individual.”
“Very well then; I know what I think. If the sacred race plays tricks on conscious human beings, using them for its own sacred purposes and giving them an unreal sense of mattering, I don’t care a button for the race and I’d rather kill myself than serve its purposes. Besides, the instincts of self preservation, and reproduction are not the only human motives … they are not human at all. …”