Mimi Forresters too, restlessly, blindly, neurotically, unceasingly seeking diversions to prevent the use of that thing they called their intellect?
Again she came back to the figure of countless millions of worried and insignificant little people obeying blindly the implacable bidding of a huge, insatiable machine. Horace Crosby seeking release and forgetfulness in an empty, sordid affair with a woman, beautiful though she was, like Dolores d’Aubigny. Bert Bellamy drugging himself with the opiate of inquisitive prying into the affairs of the prominent and the near-prominent. Eulalie Crosby gaining the sobriquet, so appropriate, of the Holy Behemoth, by her restless rushing about in ponderous worry over trivial things. Jimmie with his lodges and clubs and booster organizations where he could bathe himself in the aura of importance, however brief or illusory. Restless crowds plying themselves with sex or drink or drugs or silly diversions to forget the implacable demands of the forces that drove them on, trying hard to ignore those forces or to hypnotize themselves into believing there are no such powers. The weakest, and often the strongest, realizing the futility of it all, finding peace through a swift snuffing out of life itself.