re
walls and put words between the lines of law books, seemed to have some
message for him. Yet had he not had his final message from the actual
Mary Ellen? And, after all, did anything really matter any more?

So much for the half-morbid frame of mind due for the most part to the
reflex of a body made sick by an irregular and irrational life. This
much, too, Franklin could have established of his own philosophy. Yet
this was not all, nor was the total so easily to be explained away.

Steadily, and with an insistence somewhat horrible, there came to
Franklin's mind a feeling that this career which he saw before him
would not always serve to satisfy him. Losing no touch of the
democratic loyalty to his fellow-men, he none the less clearly saw
himself in certain ways becoming inexorably separated from his average
fellow-man. The executive instinct was still as strong within him, but
he felt it more creative, and he longed for finer material than the
seamy side of man's petty strifes with man, made possible under those
artificial laws which marked man's compromise with Nature. He found no
solace and no science in the study of the great or the small crimes of
an artificial system which did not touch individual humanity, and which
was careless of humanity's joys or sorrowings. Longing for the
satisfying, for the noble things, he found himself irresistibly facing
toward the past, and irresistibly convinced that in that past, as in
the swiftly marching present, there might be some lesson, not ignoble
and not uncomforting. Horrified that he could not rest in the way that
he had chosen, distracted at these intangible desires, he doubted at
times his perfect sanity; for though it seemed there was within him the
impulse to teach and to create, he could not say to himself what or how
was to be the form, whether mental or material, of the thing created,
the thing typified, the thing which he would teach.

Of such travail, of such mould, have come great architects, great
engineers, great writers, musicians, painters, indeed great men of
affairs, beings who stand by the head and shoulders above other men as
leaders. The nature of such men is not always at the first assured,
the imprimitive seal not always surely set on, so that of one thus
tormented of his inner self it may be mere accident which shall
determine whether it is to be great artist or great artisan that is to
be born again.

To Franklin, dreaming as he woke