people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it...

the invisible king--the elan vital--the principle of evolution...

writing a book, starting a war, founding a school....
Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all inquiries with himself.

He was his own best example--sitting in the rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in building up the living consciousness of the race.
In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance of the labyrinth.
***** Another dawn flung itself across the river, a belated taxi hurried along the street, its lamps still shining like burning eyes in a face white from a night's carouse.

A melancholy siren sounded far down the river.
***** MONSIGNOR Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own funeral.
It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical.