Stubbornly he pushed this vision away. “I’ll live in my own world to the end,” he said to himself. “Nothing shall make me yield.”

And while a gasping susurration at his side indicated that he was, in his excitement, walking too fast for Mr. Valley, he discovered that that grey feather of Christie’s which served her as a marker in the Urn-Burial had risen up again in his mind.

And as he walked along, adapting his steps to his companion’s shambling progress, he indulged in the fancy that his soul was like a vast cloudy serpent of writhing vapour that had the power of overreaching every kind of human invention. “All inventions,” he thought, “come from man’s brains. And man’s soul can escape from them and even while using them treat them with contempt⁠—treat them as if they were not ! It can slip through them like a snake, float over them like a mist, burrow under them like a mole!”