en he looked up at the sky and could not tell which were
the stars and which the lights which trouble the eyes of sleep-sick
men. There was that week when he and Perez and the two French chemists
and the handful of loyal workmen held the Romanones Works against the
strikers. He was conscious that he had behaved well on these occasions
and that they had been full of beauty, but they had not nourished him.
They had ended when they ended. Such deeds gave a man nothing better
than the exultation of the actor, who loses his value and becomes a
suspended soul, unable to fulfil his function when the curtain falls.
"But you are condemning the whole of human action!" he expostulated with
himself. "Yes, I am condemning the whole of human action," he replied
tartly.

There remained, of course, his scientific work. That was indubitably
good. He had done well, considering he had not gone to South Kensington
till he was twenty and had broken the habit of study by a life of
adventure, simply because the idea of explosiveness had captured his
imagination. That rust is a slow explosion, that every movement is the
result of a physical explosion, that explosives are capricious as women
about the forces to which they yield, so that this one will only ignite
with heat and that only with concussion--these facts had from his
earliest knowledge of them been gilded with irrational delight, and it
had been no effort to him to work at the subject with an austere
diligence that had shown itself worth while in that last paper he had
read at the Paris Conference. That was a pretty piece of research. But
now for the first time he resented his chemistry work because it was of
no service to his personal life. Before, it had always seemed to him the
special dignity of his vocation that it could conduct its researches
without resorting to the use of humanity and that he could present his
results unsigned by his own personality. He had often pitied doctors,
who, instead of dealing with exquisitely consistent chemicals, have to
work on men and women, unselected specimens of the most variable of all
species, which was singularly inept at variating in the direction of
beauty; and it seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings
of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that
would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was
lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had
felt Science t