e must be a few who know him surely for what he
is.

If only the transfiguring might of the Vision could be put into print,
there would be little in the world save books. Happily heedless of the
mockery of it all, Harlan laboured on, destined fully to sense his entire
payment much later, suffer vicariously for a few hours on account of it,
then to forget.

Dorothy, meanwhile, was learning a hard lesson. Harlan's changeless
preoccupation hurt her cruelly, but, woman-like, she considered it a
manifestation of genius and endeavoured to be proud accordingly. It had
not occurred to her that there could ever be anything in Harlan's thought
into which she was not privileged to go. She had thought of marriage as a
sort of miraculous welding of two individualities into one, and was
perceiving that it changed nothing very much; that souls went on their way
unaltered. She saw, too, that there was no one in the wide world who could
share her every mood and tense, that ultimately each one of us lives and
dies alone, within the sanctuary of his own inner self, cheered only by
some passing mood of friend or stranger, which chances to chime with his.

It was Dick who, blindly enough, helped her over many a hard place, and
quickened her sense of humour into something upon which she might securely
lean. He was too young and too much occupied with the obvious to look
further, but he felt that Dorothy was troubled, and that it was his duty,
as a man and a gentleman, to cheer her up.

Privately, he considered Harlan an amiable kind of a fool, who shut
himself up needlessly in a musty library when he might be outdoors, or
talking with a charming woman, or both. When he discovered that Harlan had
hitherto earned his living by writing and hoped to continue doing it, he
looked upon his host with profound pity. Books, to Dick, were among the
things which kept life from being wholly pleasant and agreeable. He had
gone through college because otherwise he would have been separated from
his friends, and because a small legacy from a distant relative, who had
considerately died at an opportune moment, enabled him to pay for his
tuition and his despised books.

"I was never a pig, though," he explained to Dorothy, in a confidential
moment. "There was one chump in our class who wanted to know all there was
in the book, and made himself sick trying to cram it in. All of a sudden,
he graduated. He left college feet first, three on a side, with the c