Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/208

 *naston found the result praiseworthy. Even inanimate nature, he sometimes thought, might be a divine experiment in vers libre But neither the justice of Kennaston's airdrawn surmises, nor their wildness, matters; the point is that they made of him a vestryman who in appearance and speech and actions, and in essential beliefs, differed not at all from his associates in office, who had comfortably acquired their standards by hearsay. So that the moral of his theorizing should be no less obvious than salutary.

Thus, he too entered at last into that belief which is man's noble heritage

"Or I would put it, rather, that belief is man's métier," Kennaston once corrected me—"for the sufficient reason that man has nothing to do with certainties. He cannot ever get in direct touch with reality. Such is the immutable law, the true cream of the jest. Felix Kennaston, so long as he wears the fleshly body of Felix Kennaston, is conscious only of various tiny disturbances in his brain-cells, which entertain and interest him, but cannot pretend to probe to the roots of reality