must scream at him, then she would be all
motherly tenderness. "Lawrence," she would whisper, "do it, my man. You
can, my laddie."

He tossed, and chided an unseen man or woman for having helped him
through charity under the garb of admiration. He was misunderstanding
again. He thought everything was charity, pity for his blindness, and he
raved. She began to see that this sudden bitterness which poured from
his lips was the outcome of years of sorrow, the product of a
deep-burning fire to see the beauty his soul craved.

"Lawrence," she cried, "God knows if I could I would give you my eyes!"

She knew that he was consumed with the pain of his struggle to
comprehend more beauty. Even exaggerating his hunger for sight, she wept
beside him. Her whole soul yearned to help him, to give him more of the
beauty which seemed the prime need of his nature.

Sometimes he prayed for it, addressing Fate, Nature, Chance, anything,
everything but God.

After a silence that was beginning to frighten Claire, he began again.
At first his words were indistinct, but as she leaned closer, they
cleared of guttural sounds. She listened spellbound.

"You see, I hadn't done my thinking with allowance for the whole of
human character, Claire. That was what was wrong with me. I'm doing that
now. I'm finding myself again. It is back with the beginning of things I
must start. Back with the first squirm of life in the primordial mud.
It's no use trying further back than that. No use at all. Back of that
lies only conjecture.

"There was existence, perhaps, inert unconscious existence waiting to
become suddenly aware of itself, aware of its parts and its difference
from other things. Well, existence struggling, dreaming of
self-knowledge, found in a wriggling, oozing spot of protoplasm--that's
the start of it all. Feeding without hunger, moving without knowledge to
food, reproducing mechanically by division, living without instinct,
without emotion, without death. For me, that must be the beginning.

"Whether death came, or what it was--a long period without food,
perhaps--that started this stuff to changing, I do not know. Maybe it
was existence following the way of greatest pressure toward selfhood.
Anyway, it started and began its journey. Up and up, out of the mud and
ooze, into light and dry dirt.

"The glory of light must have been a great thing then. Think of it,
coming into light, out of wet, dark mud. I know what it would be bette