Page:Solo (1924).pdf/187

 this time, put into words, might have been, "So you see, you're not as chaotic as you thought. You have a method, and it's no less wise for being instinctive. Fastidiousness is next to morality—it often serves you better."

Before putting to sea Paul laid in a supply of books. For some time past his reading had been haphazard, if voluminous, At Eureka he provided himself with the pick of what the leading bookshop had to offer, and at the last moment had the salesman include a little green paper-bound play by a certain G. B. Shaw, whose name he had often seen quoted, as though this writer were a "character" in the world of letters.

Not until he was nearing Toulon, after a fatiguing, storm-ridden voyage did he dip into Man and Superman. Then occurred a mental event of the first importance—an event more memorable than the mutinous day when he had longed to be set ashore on his coral island. After the first few répliques he felt the stirring of a mighty revival of heterodoxies. Issues he had in his first youthful rebelliousness dismissed wholesale trooped back retail for a rehearing. A sun of intellectual emancipation made a rift in the adolescent haze obscuring his vision.

He recalled his boyish struggle to keep his soul intact from the designs of the officiously pious, the fury and exasperation with which he had talked down zealots who had decoyed him to "Bethel" meetings in remote seaports, Since those days he had been a constant foe towards all forms of blind orthodoxy, but it had been difficult to find words for his iconoclasm. Well, here they were! Paul drank them in; felt them settling into him, stiffening his resolutions, giving him that rare gratification: the discovery, after the event, that there exist sound, assertable reasons for acts committed on