“One is driven, at last, back to the far distance, to look for God,” said Ramón uneasily.
“I rather hate this search-for-God business, and religiosity,” said Kate.
“I know!” he said, with a laugh. “I’ve suffered from would-be-cocksure religion myself.”
“And you can’t really ‘find God’!” she said. “It’s a sort of sentimentalism, and creeping back into old, hollow shells.”
“No!” he said slowly. “I can’t find God, in the old sense. I know it’s a sentimentalism if I pretend to. But I am nauseated with humanity and the human will: even with my own will. I have realised that my will, no matter how intelligent I am, is only another nuisance on the face of the earth, once I start exerting it. And other people’s wills are even worse.”
“Oh! isn’t human life horrible!” she cried. “Every human being exerting his will all the time—over other people, and over himself, and nearly always self-righteous!”
Ramón made a grimace of repulsion.
“To me,” he said, “that is just the weariness of life! For a time, it can be amusing: exerting your own will, and resisting all the other people’s wills, that they try to put over you. But at a certain point, a nausea sets in at the very middle of me: my soul is nauseated. My soul is nauseated, and there is nothing but death ahead, unless I find something else.”
Kate listened in silence. She knew the road he had gone, but she herself had not yet come to the end of it. As yet she was still strong in the pride of her own—her very own will.
“Oh, people are repulsive!” she cried.