“Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I should do.” “We have to do it because we’re not personalities, but personages.” “That’s a good line—what do you mean?” “A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a
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