reat thirst to know more of the vital questions of the day.
She awoke to the fact that the time was in the throes of parturition.
Something huge, cyclopean, was being born. Change already stared
iron-eyed from the cradle of the twentieth century and hammered with
fists of brass. Now was nascent its twin Disorder. She read until her
brain reeled and her heart ached. Giddy and downcast, she bared her mind
to the bludgeonings of tremendous questions which she could not
adequately comprehend. Then common sense--kind old nurse--whispered
soothingly: "'Seek not out things that are too hard for thee.' There is
a glory of the stars of Political Economy, and another of the moon of
Poetic Faculty. Thou shalt comprehend by intuition what will never be
given thee by ratiocination. For 'if a man's mind is sometimes wont to
tell him more than seven watchmen that sit above in an high tower,' a
woman's heart can divine the very stars above the tower and draw down
influences as sweet as those of Pleiades for the sustainment of her
spirit."

So Sophy left off trying to understand clearly all the "ologies" and
fly-wheel within fly-wheel movements of the day, and contented herself
with a general apprehension of the _zeitgeist_. She decided that these
gigantic sociological and political questions were for her what the
higher mathematics are to the humble arithmetician. She could
comprehend that a fourth dimension might exist, but not in what it
might consist. It consoled her to remember that in the higher
mathematics of existence as of numbers there was an "incalculable
quantity." The bigger brains, then, paused at a point higher up, just as
hers paused at one lower down.

Then again woke in her the desire to create in her own world of poetry.

All these struggles and hopes, and glees and failures--all this
turbulence of her new-straining self, she poured out in her letters to
Amaldi, and he answered them in kind. Almost every day they wrote to
each other. It seemed incredible to her that her life had once been
empty of those letters to which she now looked forward every day as to
the simple necessity of food and drink. Never once did he fail to
respond to the mood or need from which she wrote--and with so fine, so
just a discernment that sometimes he seemed to answer thoughts that she
had not written down, but that had been in her mind when she was
writing. So exquisitely true was this communication of their minds and
natures at a dista