thought that he would see her no more
stabbed ceaselessly at his heart.

Yes, Surface's son knew very well what was the matter with him now. The
knowledge pulled him from his bed to a seat by the open window; dragged
him from his chair to send him pacing on bare feet up and down his
little bedroom, up and down, up and down; threw him later, much later,
into his chair again, to gaze out, quiet and exhausted, over the
sleeping city.

He had written something of love in his time. In his perfect scheme of
human society, he had diagnosed with scientific precision the instinct
of sex attraction implanted in man's being for the most obvious and
grossly practical of reasons: an illusive candle-glow easily lit,
quickly extinguished when its uses were fulfilled. And lo, here was love
tearing him by the throat till he choked; an exquisite torture, a
rampant passion, a devastating flame, that most glorified when it burned
most deeply, aroar and ablaze forevermore.

He sat by the window and looked out over the sleeping city.

By slow degrees, he had allowed himself to be drawn from his academic
hermitry into contact with the visible life around him. And everywhere
that he had touched life, it had turned about and smitten him. He had
meant to be a great editor of the _Post_ some day, and the _Post_ had
turned him out with a brand of dishonor upon his forehead. He had tried
to befriend a friendless old man, and he had acquired a father whose
bequest was a rogue's debt, and his name a byword and a hissing. He had
let himself be befriended by a slim little girl with a passion for Truth
and enough blue eyes for two, and the price of that contact was this
pain in his heart which would not be still ... which would not be still.

Yet he would not have had anything different, would not have changed
anything if he could. He was no longer the pure scientist in the
observatory, but a bigger and better thing, a man ... A man down in the
thick of the hurly-burly which we call This Life, and which, when all is
said, is all that we certainly know. Not by pen alone, but also by body
and mind and heart and spirit, he had taken his man's place in Society.
And as for this unimagined pain that strung his whole being upon the
thumb-screw, it was nothing but the measure of the life he had now, and
had it more abundantly. Oh, all was for the best, all as it should be.
He knew the truth about living at last, and it is the truth that makes
men free.