His mind, after the experience he had gone through, seemed to float lightly and carelessly over every aspect of his existence. The personality of Christie remained the same through everything. It was as if to everything he did, even to making love to Gerda, Christie set her proud and careless seal. This indeed⁠—so he said to himself⁠—was the solution of that dilemma on which he had been impaled. Christie did remain the great aim and purpose of his life; but these innumerable other people were part of the body of that life itself. They were what he was , his ways, his habits, his customs, his manias, his impulses, his instincts; and with all that he was he had now been drawn to Christie as if by a magnet strong enough to move a great slave-galleon of manias and superstitions, en masse across the deep!