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'Just as it would be impossible to write Paradise Lost or Hamlet, collectively, so it is impossible to plan some major change in the individual life, collectively.'

'Most people,' Mary objected, 'do not lock themselves up at such a juncture. They talk it over with others, don't they?'

'Most people think collectively, I agree. But they do not usually think very clearly. They have no pretensions to being individuals. They are a collective individual, a group of some sort.'

'Are you not a group?' his sister asked, smiling.

'I was a group, a university. But when I wished, or when I felt compelled to cease to be that, I had to isolate myself, of course, and think the matter out by myself.'

'But . . .'

'But there was the domestic group, that is what you were about to say, Mary. I know. But I had to think the matter out in isolation from that. For that group would merely have pushed me back into the other group. The morals of all groups are the same. If you wish to act upon a heroic moral plane . . .'