insects leading up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts
to royal culminations and lordly achievements.

It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his story, and it
was this, he believed, that warmed her as she sat and listened. Her eyes
were wide, color was in her pale cheeks, and before he finished it seemed
to him that she was almost panting. Truly, she was warmed; but she was
warmed, not by the story, but by him. She did not think much of the
story; it was Martin's intensity of power, the old excess of strength
that seemed to pour from his body and on and over her. The paradox of it
was that it was the story itself that was freighted with his power, that
was the channel, for the time being, through which his strength poured
out to her. She was aware only of the strength, and not of the medium,
and when she seemed most carried away by what he had written, in reality
she had been carried away by something quite foreign to it--by a thought,
terrible and perilous, that had formed itself unsummoned in her brain.
She had caught herself wondering what marriage was like, and the becoming
conscious of the waywardness and ardor of the thought had terrified her.
It was unmaidenly. It was not like her. She had never been tormented by
womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy, dense
even to the full significance of that delicate master's delicate
allusions to the grossnesses that intrude upon the relations of queens
and knights. She had been asleep, always, and now life was thundering
imperatively at all her doors. Mentally she was in a panic to shoot the
bolts and drop the bars into place, while wanton instincts urged her to
throw wide her portals and bid the deliciously strange visitor to enter
in.

Martin waited with satisfaction for her verdict. He had no doubt of what
it would be, and he was astounded when he heard her say:

"It is beautiful."

"It is beautiful," she repeated, with emphasis, after a pause.

Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than mere beauty
in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty its
handmaiden. He sprawled silently on the ground, watching the grisly form
of a great doubt rising before him. He had failed. He was inarticulate.
He had seen one of the greatest things in the world, and he had not
expressed it.

"What did you think of the--" He hesitated, abashed at his first attempt
to use a strange wor