unicated the
stuff of fancy and feeling from out of his brain. It had struck home. No
matter whether she liked it or not, it had gripped her and mastered her,
made her sit there and listen and forget details.

"It is life," he said, "and life is not always beautiful. And yet,
perhaps because I am strangely made, I find something beautiful there. It
seems to me that the beauty is tenfold enhanced because it is there--"

"But why couldn't the poor woman--" she broke in disconnectedly. Then
she left the revolt of her thought unexpressed to cry out: "Oh! It is
degrading! It is not nice! It is nasty!"

For the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still. _Nasty_! He
had never dreamed it. He had not meant it. The whole sketch stood
before him in letters of fire, and in such blaze of illumination he
sought vainly for nastiness. Then his heart began to beat again. He was
not guilty.

"Why didn't you select a nice subject?" she was saying. "We know there
are nasty things in the world, but that is no reason--"

She talked on in her indignant strain, but he was not following her. He
was smiling to himself as he looked up into her virginal face, so
innocent, so penetratingly innocent, that its purity seemed always to
enter into him, driving out of him all dross and bathing him in some
ethereal effulgence that was as cool and soft and velvety as starshine.
_We know there are nasty things in the world_! He cuddled to him the
notion of her knowing, and chuckled over it as a love joke. The next
moment, in a flashing vision of multitudinous detail, he sighted the
whole sea of life's nastiness that he had known and voyaged over and
through, and he forgave her for not understanding the story. It was
through no fault of hers that she could not understand. He thanked God
that she had been born and sheltered to such innocence. But he knew
life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the
slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on it to
the world. Saints in heaven--how could they be anything but fair and
pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime--ah, that was the
everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral
grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first
glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-dripping eyes; to see out of
weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness,
arising streng