Wilder and wilder grew his thoughts as he rounded off the destiny of the House of Stuart to those furtive listeners. Rows upon rows of dwarf-men⁠ ⁠… that is how he saw them now, these boys of his⁠ ⁠… embryo-men, with a kind of distorted, atrophied intelligence, full of a jeering, idiotic cunning! Oh, how he hated them and the task of teaching them!

Suddenly in the very middle of his lesson he felt his voice changing and becoming strangely vibrant. Good God! What things were on the tip of his tongue to say to them! Was he going to “dance his malice-dance” before them, as he had danced it before that London audience? Life upon this earth began to show itself to him in a most evil light.

This killing of his “mythology,” how could he survive it? His “mythology” had been his escape from life, his escape into a world where machinery could not reach him, his escape into a deep, green, lovely world, where thoughts unfolded themselves like large, beautiful leaves, growing out of fathoms of blue-green water!