political idealism with some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting
day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life
staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate,
definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to
take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make
for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit
to paper or canvas? Struggling in a laboratory through weary years for
one iota of relative truth in a mass of wheels or a test tube--"

"Have you?"

Maury paused, and in his answer, when it came, there was a measure of
weariness, a bitter overnote that lingered for a moment in those three
minds before it floated up and off like a bubble bound for the moon.

"Not I," he said softly. "I was born tired--but with the quality of
mother wit, the gift of women like Gloria--to that, for all my talking
and listening, my waiting in vain for the eternal generality that seems
to lie just beyond every argument and every speculation, to that I have
added not one jot."

In the distance a deep sound that had been audible for some moments
identified itself by a plaintive mooing like that of a gigantic cow and
by the pearly spot of a headlight apparent half a mile away. It was a
steam-driven train this time, rumbling and groaning, and as it tumbled
by with a monstrous complaint it sent a shower of sparks and cinders
over the platform.

"Not one jot!" Again Maury's voice dropped down to them as from a great
height. "What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its