to complete for a magazine for which they were in a hurry. So
he decided to wait till that was done.

In late June he went up to the Blue Ridge, in Southern Pennsylvania,
where Florizel was situated. He thought at first he would be invited to
stay at the Channing bungalow, but Christina warned him that it would be
safer and better for him to stay at one of the adjoining hotels. There
were several on the slope of adjacent hills at prices ranging from five
to ten dollars a day. Though this was high for Eugene he decided to go.
He wanted to be with this marvellous creature--to see just what she did
mean by wishing they were in the mountains together.

He had saved some eight hundred dollars, which was in a savings bank and
he withdrew three hundred for his little outing. He took Christina a
very handsomely bound copy of Villon, of whom she was fond, and several
volumes of new verse. Most of these, chosen according to his most recent
mood, were sad in their poetic texture; they all preached the
nothingness of life, its sadness, albeit the perfection of its beauty.

At this time Eugene had quite reached the conclusion that there was no
hereafter--there was nothing save blind, dark force moving
aimlessly--where formerly he had believed vaguely in a heaven and had
speculated as to a possible hell. His reading had led him through some
main roads and some odd by-paths of logic and philosophy. He was an
omnivorous reader now and a fairly logical thinker. He had already
tackled Spencer's "First Principles," which had literally torn him up by
the roots and set him adrift and from that had gone back to Marcus
Aurelius, Epictetus, Spinoza and Schopenhauer--men who ripped out all
his private theories and made him wonder what life really was. He had
walked the streets for a long time after reading some of these things,
speculating on the play of forces, the decay of matter, the fact that
thought-forms had no more stability than cloud-forms. Philosophies came
and went, governments came and went, races arose and disappeared. He
walked into the great natural history museum of New York once to
discover enormous skeletons of prehistoric animals--things said to have
lived two, three, five millions of years before his day and he marvelled
at the forces which produced them, the indifference, apparently, with
which they had been allowed to die. Nature seemed lavish of its types
and utterly indifferent to the persistence of anything. He came t