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 stand, but they read me anyway. Perhaps I should be satisfied.

Campaspe was silent, but it was obvious that she was listening, and after a moment he went on: The incoherence of life has always interested me, the appalling disconnection. We wander around alone, each with his own thoughts, his own ideas. We connect only in flashes.

Only in flashes?

Yes. It usually happens in this way: abruptly, quite unreasonably, one individual unconsciously—it's always unconsciously—produces an effect, a chemical change, let us call it, in another person with whom he comes in contact. This phenomenon in itself creates enough energy so that presently still others are affected. Wider and wider sweep the circles, like the circles created by the tossing of a pebble into a lake, until at last they dissipate, and the lake becomes placid again.

Campaspe regarded him with an interrogative eye.

Or, to put it figuratively in another fashion, he continued, you must think of a group of people in terms of a packet of firecrackers. You ignite the first cracker and the flash fires the fuse of the second, and so on, until, after a series of crackling detonations, the whole bunch has exploded, and nothing survives but a few torn and scattered bits of paper, blackened with powder. On the other