ok, his splendid mission, his communion with Adele, his
very life, depended upon this wondrous psychic. Without her the world
was a chaos, life a failure, and his faith a bitter, mocking lie. With
a sobbing groan he covered his face, his heart utterly gone, his brain
benumbed, his future black as night.

And yet outside the window, in reach of his hand, the spring sunlight
vividly fell. The waves of the river glittered like glass and ships
moved to and fro like butterflies. The sky was full of snowy
clouds--harbingers of the warm winds of spring. Sparrows twittered
along the eaves, and the mighty city, with joy in its prosaic heart,
was pacing majestically into the new and pleasant month.

XVII

WHEN DOCTORS DISAGREE

At breakfast next morning Morton took up the paper with apprehension,
and though he found Clarke's name spread widely on the page, he was
relieved to find only one allusion to the unknown psychic on whose
mystic power the orator was depending.

"She has another day of grace," he said to himself, thinking of
Lambert.

All the way down to his laboratory he pretended to read the news, but
could not succeed in interesting himself in the wars and famines of
the world, so much more vital and absorbing were his own passions and
retreats, so filmy was the abstract, so concrete and vital the
particular. A million children might be starving in India, a thousand
virgins about to be sold to slavery in Turkestan; but such
intelligence counted little to a man struggling with doubt of the
woman he loves, and questioning further the right of any philosopher
to marry and bring children into a life of bafflement and pain and
ultimate annihilation.

This must ever be so. The particular must outweigh the general, and
philosophers, even the monists, must continue to be inconsistent. The
individual must of necessity consider himself first and humanity
afterwards; for if all men considered the welfare of the race to the
neglect of self, the race would die at the root and the individual
perish of his too-widely diffused pity. To be the altruist, one must
first be the egoist (say the philosophers), to give, one must first
have.

The questions which filled this implacable young investigator's mind
were these: Is my love worthy? And again: Dare I, insisting on man's
unity with all other organisms and subject to the same laws of
extinction, entertain the idea of marriage? If the theories I hold are
true--if the so