igality--but that
he himself should be so was clearly unthinkable. Deep down in him there
was the obstinate belief that his existence was a vital matter to the
awful Power that ruled the universe; and while he worked that May
evening at the second act of his great play, with the sweat raining from
his brow in the sweltering heat, it was as impossible for him to
conceive of ultimate failure as it was for him to realize that he should
ever cease to exist. The air was stagnant, the light was bad, his
stomach was empty, and he was tormented by the stinging of the gnats
that circled around the flame--but he was gloriously happy with the
happiness of a man who has given himself to an idea.

CHAPTER VII

THE ARTIST IN PHILISTIA

At dawn, after a sleepless night, Oliver dressed himself and made a cup
of coffee on the spirit lamp he carried in his bag. While he drank, a
sense of power passed over him like warmth. He was cheered, he was even
exhilarated. A single cup of this miraculous fluid, and his depression
was vanquished as no argument could have vanquished it. Without
sermonizing, without logic even, the demon of pessimism, which has its
home in an empty stomach, was expelled into spiritual darkness. He
remembered that he had eaten nothing for almost twenty-four hours
(having missed yesterday's dinner), and this thought carried him
downstairs, where he begged a roll from a yawning negro cook in the
kitchen. Coming up to his room again, he poured out a second cup of
coffee, added a dash of cream, which he had brought with him in a
handleless pitcher, and leaning comfortably back in the worn horsehair
covered chair by the window, relapsed into a positive orgy of enjoyment.
His whole attitude toward the universe had been altered by a bubbling
potful of brown liquid, and the tremendous result--so grotesquely out of
proportion to its cause--appeared to him at the minute entirely right
and proper. Everything was entirely right and proper, and he felt able
to approve with a clear conscience the Divine arrangement of existence.

Outside, the sunrise, which he could not see, was flooding the roofs of
Dinwiddie with a dull golden light. The heat had given way before the
soft wind which smelt of flowers, and scattered tiny shreds of mist,
like white rose-leaves, over the moist gardens. The look of unreality,
which had been a fiction of the moonlight, faded gradually as the day
broke, and left the harsh outlines and the bla