hidden temple but has
not followed it; who has, perhaps, caught glimpses of the temple and
striven afterward to convince himself that it was only a mirage of
foliage. Yet another way. A man who could have done things but who
placed no value on the doing, and who, all the time, in his innermost
heart, is regretting that he has not done them; who has secretly laughed
at the rewards for doing, and yet, still more secretly, has yearned for
the rewards and for the joy of doing."

"I don't read him that way," she said. "And for that matter, I don't see
just what you mean."

"It is only a vague feeling on my part," Martin temporized. "I have no
reason for it. It is only a feeling, and most likely it is wrong. You
certainly should know him better than I."

From the evening at Ruth's Martin brought away with him strange
confusions and conflicting feelings. He was disappointed in his goal, in
the persons he had climbed to be with. On the other hand, he was
encouraged with his success. The climb had been easier than he expected.
He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with false modesty, hide
it from himself) he was superior to the beings among whom he had
climbed--with the exception, of course, of Professor Caldwell. About
life and the books he knew more than they, and he wondered into what
nooks and crannies they had cast aside their educations. He did not know
that he was himself possessed of unusual brain vigor; nor did he know
that the persons who were given to probing the depths and to thinking
ultimate thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of the
world's Morses; nor did he dream that such persons were as lonely eagles
sailing solitary in the azure sky far above the earth and its swarming
freight of gregarious life.

CHAPTER XXVIII

But success had lost Martin's address, and her messengers no longer came
to his door. For twenty-five days, working Sundays and holidays, he
toiled on "The Shame of the Sun," a long essay of some thirty thousand
words. It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of the Maeterlinck
school--an attack from the citadel of positive science upon the wonder-
dreamers, but an attack nevertheless that retained much of beauty and
wonder of the sort compatible with ascertained fact. It was a little
later that he followed up the attack with two short essays, "The Wonder-
Dreamers" and "The Yardstick of the Ego." And on essays, long and short,
he began to pay