dark. I begin to ask if I know what love is--if anybody knows what
it is. Do you? If so, what is it? Is it the same thing for every one? or
does it differ with individuals? Is it a temporary thing?--or a
permanent thing?--or does it matter? Is it one of the highest promptings
we have?--or one of the lowest?--or is it that primary impulse of
animate nature which when developed and perfected leads to God? Is there
a spiritual man and a carnal man, each with a love that can conflict
with the love of the other? Is the one man on the side of the angels, as
Uncle Sim would say, and the other man on that of the flesh, till the
stronger gains the victory? Or is there something in love of the nature
of obsession? Does it come and go like the tornado--as violent in its
passage, but as quickly passed? Thor, darling, I begin to be afraid of
love. If we are to start again I want it to be on some other ground--a
new ground--a ground we don't know anything about as yet, but which
perhaps we shall discover."

CHAPTER XXIX

Thorley Masterman pondered on the words Lois had written him as he
tramped along the bluffs above the Mississippi, with the towers and
spires of Minneapolis looming like battlements through the haze of an
afternoon at the end of June. He had left the conference on new methods
of treating the thyroid gland which was being held in St. Paul in order
to think his position out. Having motored over from his hotel in
Minneapolis, he preferred to "tramp it" back. The glorious wooded way on
the St. Paul side of the river was in itself an invitation to his
strong, striding limbs, while the wine of Western air and the stimulus
of Western energy quickened the savage outdoor impulse so ready to leap
in his blood. The song of mating birds quickened it, too, and the
romance of the river gliding through the gorge below, and the beauty of
the cities eying each other like embattled queens from headland across
to headland and through the splendor of the promise of a gold-and-purple
sunset.

It was a great setting for great thoughts, inspiring ideas so large that
when he reached his hotel he found them too big to reduce easily to
paper.

"You ask me what love is, and say you don't know. I'm more daring than
you in that I think I do know. I know two or three things about it, even
if I don't know all.

"For one thing, I know that no one can do more than say what love is for
himself. You can't say what it is for me, or isn't,