in the
grain of sand under one's foot. This new concept was a perpetual
amazement to Martin, and he found himself engaged continually in tracing
the relationship between all things under the sun and on the other side
of the sun. He drew up lists of the most incongruous things and was
unhappy until he succeeded in establishing kinship between them
all--kinship between love, poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes,
rainbows, precious gems, monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions,
illuminating gas, cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and
tobacco. Thus, he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it,
or wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a terrified
traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown goal, but
observing and charting and becoming familiar with all there was to know.
And the more he knew, the more passionately he admired the universe, and
life, and his own life in the midst of it all.

"You fool!" he cried at his image in the looking-glass. "You wanted to
write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you to write about.
What did you have in you?--some childish notions, a few half-baked
sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance,
a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love
and as futile as your ignorance. And you wanted to write! Why, you're
just on the edge of beginning to get something in you to write about. You
wanted to create beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about
the nature of beauty? You wanted to write about life when you knew
nothing of the essential characteristics of life. You wanted to write
about the world and the scheme of existence when the world was a Chinese
puzzle to you and all that you could have written would have been about
what you did not know of the scheme of existence. But cheer up, Martin,
my boy. You'll write yet. You know a little, a very little, and you're
on the right road now to know more. Some day, if you're lucky, you may
come pretty close to knowing all that may be known. Then you will
write."

He brought his great discovery to Ruth, sharing with her all his joy and
wonder in it. But she did not seem to be so enthusiastic over it. She
tacitly accepted it and, in a way, seemed aware of it from her own
studies. It did not stir her deeply, as it did him, and he would have
been surprised had he not reasoned it out that it was not n