e present. But I want you
to go somewhere else if you have to--London or Paris. The world won't
understand us quite--but I do."

"Berenice!" He smothered her cheek and hair.

"Not so close, please. And there aren't to be any other ladies, unless
you want me to change my mind."

"Not another one, as I hope to keep you. You will share everything I
have..."

For answer--

How strange are realities as opposed to illusion!

In Retrospect

The world is dosed with too much religion. Life is to be learned from
life, and the professional moralist is at best but a manufacturer of
shoddy wares. At the ultimate remove, God or the life force, if
anything, is an equation, and at its nearest expression for man--the
contract social--it is that also. Its method of expression appears to
be that of generating the individual, in all his glittering variety and
scope, and through him progressing to the mass with its problems. In
the end a balance is invariably struck wherein the mass subdues the
individual or the individual the mass--for the time being. For,
behold, the sea is ever dancing or raging.

In the mean time there have sprung up social words and phrases
expressing a need of balance--of equation. These are right, justice,
truth, morality, an honest mind, a pure heart--all words meaning: a
balance must be struck. The strong must not be too strong; the weak
not too weak. But without variation how could the balance be
maintained? Nirvana! Nirvana! The ultimate, still, equation.

Rushing like a great comet to the zenith, his path a blazing trail,
Cowperwood did for the hour illuminate the terrors and wonders of
individuality. But for him also the eternal equation--the pathos of
the discovery that even giants are but pygmies, and that an ultimate
balance must be struck. Of the strange, tortured, terrified reflection
of those who, caught in his wake, were swept from the normal and the
commonplace, what shall we say? Legislators by the hundred, who were
hounded from politics into their graves; a half-hundred aldermen of
various councils who were driven grumbling or whining into the limbo of
the dull, the useless, the commonplace. A splendid governor dreaming of
an ideal on the one hand, succumbing to material necessity on the
other, traducing the spirit that aided him the while he tortured
himself with his own doubts. A second governor, more amenable, was to
be greeted by the hisses of the populace, to ret