This illusory existence preoccupying Basine had fitted him ideally for the companionship of orderly, placid-minded folk preoccupied like himself with similar processes of evaporation. These folk were his friends with whom he went to the theater, played cards, transacted business, discussed issues. They were known as normal, practical persons. The vast, illusory worlds in which they lived during the greater part of their hours in no way encroached upon the realities of their day.
They were proud of having a grip on themselves, by which they meant of being able to allow their energies to evaporate secretively instead of feeling inspired to harness them to realities and run the risk of being hoisted body and soul out of their shells into a maelstrom of uncertainties and hullabaloos. In order to rationalize the disparity between their actual estates and the fantastic estates of their illusory lives, they devoted a part of their energies to the practical business of glorifying their shells. They subscribed with indignation, sometimes with fanaticism, to all social, spiritual and political ideas which had for their objective the glorification of their shells. They became champions of systems of thought and conduct which excused on one hand and deified on the other their devitalized modes of existence.
In fact as they grew older they developed a curious egoism which took the form of a pride in their suppressions. They thought of themselves as men who had achieved a superior sanity. This sanity lay in being able to recognize the real from the unreal. The real was their shell. The unreal consisted of the fantasies produced by the process of evaporation. This sanity, too, enabled them to regard their imaginings and dreamings with an amused condescension and to mature into unruffled effigies--practical, hard-headed business men.
The evaporation, however, influenced them in one vital respect. It effected what they called their taste in the arts. They desired things they read or listened to in the theater to be authentic interpretations not of the realities about them but of the illusions in which they secretly exhausted themselves. They desired the heroes and heroines of literature and drama to be like the creatures and excitements of the soap-bubble worlds bursting conveniently about their hard heads. And so in their reading and theater going they enjoyed only those things which afforded a few hours of vicarious reality to the grotesqueries, to the fairy tale expansions of their departing dreams.