rdener who for an unfathomable purpose had set the
inexplicable seed in an unthinkable universe. From the ephemera to the
star he accepted and conjectured, and while he often thought ill of the
living, he had never yet thought ill of life. He had long been allied
with a thinker who, with a low estimate of at least so much of human
nature as ran counter to his purposes, yet believed with devoutness in
the perfectibility of his species, and had of the future a large, calm,
and noble vision. If Lewis Rand had not Jefferson's equanimity, his sane
and wise belief in the satisfying power of common daylight, common
pleasures, all the common relations of daily life; if some strangeness
in his nature thrilled to the meteor's flight, craved the exotic,
responded to clashing and barbaric music, yet the two preached the same
doctrine. He believed in the doctrine, though he also believed that
great men are not mastered by doctrine. They made doctrine their
servant, their useful slave of the lamp. He knew--none better--that the
genie might turn and rend; that there was always one last, one fatal
thing that must not be asked. But his mind was supple, and he thought
that he could fence with the genie. Usually, when he spoke, he believed
all that he said, believed it with all the strength of his reason, and
yet--he saw the kingdoms of the world. To-night, in the autumn air, pure
and cold beneath the autumn stars, with the feeling and the fragrance of
the forest day about him, in sympathy with his audience, and conscious
in every fibre of the presence of the woman whom he loved, he saw no
other kingdom than that of high and tranquil thought.

Jacqueline, seated at her open window, listened for the first time to
any public utterance of her husband's. He was not a man who often spoke
of the processes of his thought. Sometimes, in the house on the
Three-Notched Road, he told her, briefly, his conclusions on such and
such a matter, but he rarely described the road by which he travelled.
She knew the conservative, the British, the Federal side of most
questions. That was the cleared country, familiar, safe, and smiling;
her husband's side was the strange forest which she had entered and must
travel through. She was yet afraid of the forest, of its lights and its
shadows, the rough places and the smooth, the stir of its air and the
possibility of wild beasts. To her it was night-time there, and where
the ground seemed fair and the light to play