tum. I'm getting my first real feel
of things now. I'm beginning to size up the situation--"

"Please don't say 'size up,'" she interrupted.

"To get a line on things," he hastily amended.

"That doesn't mean anything in correct English," she objected.

He floundered for a fresh start.

"What I'm driving at is that I'm beginning to get the lay of the land."

Out of pity she forebore, and he went on.

"Knowledge seems to me like a chart-room. Whenever I go into the
library, I am impressed that way. The part played by teachers is to
teach the student the contents of the chart-room in a systematic way. The
teachers are guides to the chart-room, that's all. It's not something
that they have in their own heads. They don't make it up, don't create
it. It's all in the chart-room and they know their way about in it, and
it's their business to show the place to strangers who might else get
lost. Now I don't get lost easily. I have the bump of location. I
usually know where I'm at--What's wrong now?"

"Don't say 'where I'm at.'"

"That's right," he said gratefully, "where I am. But where am I at--I
mean, where am I? Oh, yes, in the chart-room. Well, some people--"

"Persons," she corrected.

"Some persons need guides, most persons do; but I think I can get along
without them. I've spent a lot of time in the chart-room now, and I'm on
the edge of knowing my way about, what charts I want to refer to, what
coasts I want to explore. And from the way I line it up, I'll explore a
whole lot more quickly by myself. The speed of a fleet, you know, is the
speed of the slowest ship, and the speed of the teachers is affected the
same way. They can't go any faster than the ruck of their scholars, and
I can set a faster pace for myself than they set for a whole schoolroom."

"'He travels the fastest who travels alone,'" she quoted at him.

But I'd travel faster with you just the same, was what he wanted to blurt
out, as he caught a vision of a world without end of sunlit spaces and
starry voids through which he drifted with her, his arm around her, her
pale gold hair blowing about his face. In the same instant he was aware
of the pitiful inadequacy of speech. God! If he could so frame words
that she could see what he then saw! And he felt the stir in him, like a
throe of yearning pain, of the desire to paint these visions that flashed
unsummoned on the mirror of his mind. Ah, that was it! He caught at the