l thought. As for the
portrait-painter, she was a positive bore. She'd make a good wife for
the cashier. And the musician woman! I don't care how nimble her
fingers are, how perfect her technique, how wonderful her expression--the
fact is, she knows nothing about music."

"She plays beautifully," Ruth protested.

"Yes, she's undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but the
intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her. I asked her what music
meant to her--you know I'm always curious to know that particular thing;
and she did not know what it meant to her, except that she adored it,
that it was the greatest of the arts, and that it meant more than life to
her."

"You were making them talk shop," Ruth charged him.

"I confess it. And if they were failures on shop, imagine my sufferings
if they had discoursed on other subjects. Why, I used to think that up
here, where all the advantages of culture were enjoyed--" He paused for
a moment, and watched the youthful shade of himself, in stiff-rim and
square-cut, enter the door and swagger across the room. "As I was
saying, up here I thought all men and women were brilliant and radiant.
But now, from what little I've seen of them, they strike me as a pack of
ninnies, most of them, and ninety percent of the remainder as bores. Now
there's Professor Caldwell--he's different. He's a man, every inch of
him and every atom of his gray matter."

Ruth's face brightened.

"Tell me about him," she urged. "Not what is large and brilliant--I know
those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse. I am most curious to
know."

"Perhaps I'll get myself in a pickle." Martin debated humorously for a
moment. "Suppose you tell me first. Or maybe you find in him nothing
less than the best."

"I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for two
years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression."

"Bad impression, you mean? Well, here goes. He is all the fine things
you think about him, I guess. At least, he is the finest specimen of
intellectual man I have met; but he is a man with a secret shame."

"Oh, no, no!" he hastened to cry. "Nothing paltry nor vulgar. What I
mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the bottom of things,
and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes believe to himself that he
never saw it. Perhaps that's not the clearest way to express it. Here's
another way. A man who has found the path to the