es, swiftly, with secretive fingers, she
had plucked his letter down from its public prominence, and fled
across the hall holding it fast and hidden. She read her letters
in the botany laboratory, where her corner was always reserved
to her.

Several letters, and then he was coming. It was Friday
afternoon he appointed. She worked over her microscope with
feverish activity, able to give only half her attention, yet
working closely and rapidly. She had on her slide some special
stuff come up from London that day, and the professor was fussy
and excited about it. At the same time, as she focused the light
on her field, and saw the plant-animal lying shadowy in a
boundless light, she was fretting over a conversation she had
had a few days ago with Dr. Frankstone, who was a woman doctor
of physics in the college.

"No, really," Dr. Frankstone had said, "I don't see why we
should attribute some special mystery to life--do you? We
don't understand it as we understand electricity, even, but that
doesn't warrant our saying it is something special, something
different in kind and distinct from everything else in the
universe--do you think it does? May it not be that life
consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities, of
the same order as the activities we already know in science? I
don't see, really, why we should imagine there is a special
order of life, and life alone----"

The conversation had ended on a note of uncertainty,
indefinite, wistful. But the purpose, what was the purpose?
Electricity had no soul, light and heat had no soul. Was she
herself an impersonal force, or conjunction of forces, like one
of these? She looked still at the unicellular shadow that lay
within the field of light, under her microscope. It was alive.
She saw it move--she saw the bright mist of its ciliary
activity, she saw the gleam of its nucleus, as it slid across
the plane of light. What then was its will? If it was a
conjunction of forces, physical and chemical, what held these
forces unified, and for what purpose were they unified?

For what purpose were the incalculable physical and chemical
activities nodalized in this shadowy, moving speck under her
microscope? What was the will which nodalized them and created
the one thing she saw? What was its intention? To be itself? Was
its purpose just mechanical and limited to itself?

It intended to be itself. But what self? Suddenly in her mind
the world gleamed strangely,