alves of life. He looked about him in the little
village where he was brought up, and found that the men had married the
women who were there for them to marry. They had never sailed across
seas, had never searched the stars, had never questioned their own
souls, asking, "Is this, then, the Other of me?" Seeing that this was
the way of human beings, he was ashamed. It aroused him to hear of
this man or that who, having attained a certain number of cattle or a
given amount of household goods, conceived himself now ready to marry,
and who therefore made court to the neighbour's daughter, and who
forthwith did marry her. To his dreamer's heart it seemed that there
should be search, that there should be a sign, so that it should be
sure that the moment had come, that the Other had been found. With
some men this delusion lasts very late. With some women it endures
forever. For these there may be, after all, another world somewhere in
the recurrent quotient which runs indefinitely out into the stars.

With these vague philosophizings, these morbid self-queryings, there
came into conflict the sterner and more practical side of Franklin's
nature, itself imperious and positive in its demands. Thus he found
himself, in his rude surroundings on the Plains, a man still unsettled
and restless, ambitious for success, but most of all ambitious with
that deadly inner ambition to stand for his own equation, to be
himself, to reach his own standards; that ambition which sends so many
broken hearts into graves whose headstones tell no history. Franklin
wondered deliberately what it must be to succeed, what it must be to
achieve. And he wondered deliberately what it must mean to love, to
find by good fortune or by just deserts, voyaging somewhere in the
weltering sea of life, in the weltering seas of all these unmoved
stars, that other being which was to mean that he had found himself.
To the searcher who seeks thus starkly, to the dreamer who has not
yielded; but who has deserved his dream, there can be no mistaking when
the image comes.

Therefore to Edward Franklin the tawdry hotel parlour on the morning
after the ball at Ellisville was no mere four-square habitation, but a
chamber of the stars. The dingy chairs and sofas were to him articles
of joy and beauty. The curtains at the windows, cracked and seamed,
made to him but a map of the many devious happinesses which life should
thenceforth show. The noises of the street