Aldous Huxley

“ Gumbril answered. “It’s appalling that human beings should have to live like that. Worse than dogs.”
“Dogs have nothing to complain of.” Shearwater went off at a tangent. “Nor guinea-pigs, nor rats. It’s these blasted anti-vivisection maniacs who make all the fuss.”
“But think,” cried Gumbril, “what these wretched people have had to suffer! Walking all the way to Portsmouth in search of work; and the woman with child. It’s horrifying. And then, the way people of that class are habitually treated. One has no idea of it until one has actually been treated that way oneself. ”

“ Gumbril performed the introduction in more commonplace style.
“You don’t seem to take much interest in us, Mr. Shearwater,” Myra called expiringly. Shearwater looked up; Mrs. Viveash regarded him intently through pale, unwavering eyes, smiling as she looked that queer, downward-turning smile which gave to her face, through its mask of laughter, a peculiar expression of agony. “You don’t seem to take much interest in us,” she repeated.
Shearwater shook his heavy head. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I do.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Why should I? There’s not time to be interested in everything. ”

“ How gleefully I should lead you all into it!”
“I think you would do well,” said Shearwater gravely, “to go and see a doctor.”
Coleman gave vent to a howl of delight.
“Does it occur to you,” he went on, “that at this moment we are walking through the midst of seven million distinct and separate individuals, each with distinct and separate lives and all completely indifferent to our existence? Seven million people, each one of whom thinks himself quite as important as each of us does. Millions of them are now sleeping in an empested atmosphere. ”

“ Mrs. Viveash went on, smiling painfully, speaking huskily, expiringly, “of legs?”
A spring of blasphemy was touched in Coleman’s brain. “Neither delighteth He in any man’s legs,” he shouted, and with an extravagant show of affection he embraced Zoe, who caught hold of his hand and bit it.
“It comes back on you when you get tired like, malaria does.” The man’s face was sallow and there was an air of peculiar listlessness and hopelessness about his misery. “It comes back on you, and then you go down with fever and you’re as weak as a child.”
Shearwater shook his head. ”

“ Hundreds of thousands of couples are at this moment engaged in mutually caressing one another in a manner too hideous to be thought of, but in no way differing from the manner in which each of us performs, delightfully, passionately and beautifully, his similar work of love. Thousands of women are now in the throes of parturition, and of both sexes thousands are dying of the most diverse and appalling diseases, or simply because they have lived too long. Thousands are drunk, thousands have over-eaten, thousands have not had enough to eat. ”

“ Viveash went on, “who speak of women with a large W and pretend we’re all the same? Poor Theodore here might possibly think so in his feebler moments.” Gumbril smiled vaguely from a distance. He was following the man with the teacup into the magistrate’s stuffy court. “And Mercaptan certainly does, because all the women who ever sat on his dix-huitième sofa certainly were exactly like one another. And perhaps Casimir does too; all women look like his absurd ideal. But you, Shearwater, you’re intelligent. Surely you don’t believe anything so stupid?” ”

“ All the legless soldiers grinding barrel-organs, all the hawkers of toys stamping their leaky boots in the gutters of the Strand; at the corner of Cursitor Street and Chancery Lane, the old woman with matches, for ever holding to her left eye a handkerchief as yellow and dirty as the winter fog. ”

“ I haven’t the leisure.”
“And what do you allow yourself to be interested in?”
“Shall we go?” said Bruin impatiently; he had succeeded in swallowing the last fragment of his hard-boiled egg. Mrs. Viveash did not answer, did not even look at him.
Shearwater, who had hesitated before replying, was about to speak. But Coleman answered for him. “Be respectful,” he said to Mrs. Viveash. “This is a great man. He reads no papers, not even those in which our Mercaptan so beautifully writes. He does not know what a beaver is. And he lives for nothing but the kidneys.” ”

“ Bruin ignored the remark. With an expression of painfully repressed disgust he was eating a hard-boiled egg. Myra’s caprices were becoming more and more impossible. That Hampton Court business had been bad enough; but when it came to eating in the street, in the middle of a lot of filthy workmen—well, really, that was rather too much.
Mrs. Viveash looked about her. “Am I never to know who this mysterious person is?” She pointed to Shearwater, who was standing a little apart from the group, his back leaning against the Park railings and staring thoughtfully at the ground. ”

“ He marked the rhythm with heavy stamps of his feet.
“Ah, if only they’d invent servants with internal combustion engines,” said Bruin, almost pathetically. “However well trained they are, they always betray their humanity occasionally. And that is really intolerable.”
“How tedious is a guilty conscience!” Gumbril murmured the quotation.
“But Mr. Shearwater,” said Myra, bringing back the conversation to more congenial themes, “hasn’t told us yet what he thinks of arms.”
“Nothing at all,” said Shearwater. “I’m occupied with the regulation of the blood at the moment.” ”

“ I was leadin’ Jerry up the ’ill—Jerry’s the name of our ole pony....”
“One can’t have everything,” Shearwater was explaining, “not all at the same time, in any case. I’ve arranged my life for work now. I’m quietly married, I simmer away domestically.”
“Quelle horreur!” said Mr. Mercaptan. All the Louis Quinze Abbé in him was shocked and revolted by the thought.
“But love?” questioned Mrs. Viveash. “Love?”
“Love!” Lypiatt echoed. He was looking up at the Milky Way. ”