These men, too, were wheels within the machine, each revolving as he must.

They would simply pity him, or be amused.
More and more acutely was he coming to feel the futility, the crass, absurd presumption of what he had come back to undertake.

From the lucid quiet of his mountain haunts he had descended into a vale where antiquated cymbals clashed in wild discordance above the confusing clatter of an intricate machinery--machinery too complicated to be readjusted by a passing dreamer.

In his years of solitude he had grown to believe that the teachers of the world were no longer dominated by that ancient superstition of a superhumanly malignant God.

He had been prepared to find that the world-ideal had grown more lofty in his absence, been purified by many eliminations into a God who, as he had once said to Nance, could no more spare the soul of a Hottentot than the soul of a pope.