man would take him for a little
while as Christina was doing now, and then leave him? His experience
here was making him think, throwing his theories and ideas up in the
air, making a mess of all the notions he had ever formed about things.
He racked his brain over the intricacies of sex and life, sitting on the
great verandas of the hotel and wondering over and over just what the
answer was, and why he could not like other men be faithful to one woman
and be happy. He wondered whether this was really so, and whether he
could not. It seemed to him then that he might. He knew that he did not
understand himself very clearly; that he had no grasp on himself at all
as yet--his tendencies, his possibilities.

These days, under such halcyon conditions, made a profound impression on
him. He was struck with the perfection life could reach at odd moments.
These great quiet hills, so uniform in their roundness, so green, so
peaceful, rested his soul. He and Christina climbed, one day, two
thousand feet to a ledge which jutted out over a valley and commanded
what seemed to him the kingdoms and the powers of the earth--vast
stretches of green land and subdivided fields, little cottage
settlements and towns, great hills that stood up like friendly brothers
to this one in the distance.

"See that man down in that yard," said Christina, pointing to a speck of
a being chopping wood in a front space serving as a garden to a country
cottage fully a mile distant.

"Where?" asked Eugene.

"See where that red barn is, just this side of that clump of
trees?--don't you see? there, where the cows are in that field."

"I don't see any cows."

"Oh, Eugene, what's the matter with your eyes?"

"Oh, now I see," he replied, squeezing her fingers. "He looks like a
cockroach, doesn't he?"

"Yes," she laughed.

"How wide the earth is and how small we are. Now think of that speck
with all his hopes and ambitions--all the machinery of his brain and
nerves and tell me whether any God can care. How can He, Christina?"

"He can't care for any one particular speck much, sweet. He might care
for the idea of man or a race of men as a whole. Still, I'm not sure,
honey. All I know is that I'm happy now."

"And I," he echoed.

Still they dug at this problem, the question of the origin of life--its
why. The tremendous and wearisome age of the earth; the veritable storms
of birth and death that seemed to have raged at different periods, held
them in