figure how to increase
his cut to thirty million feet.

"I'll do it," he muttered to himself, after Wallace had gone out to
visit the mill. "I've been demanding success of others for a good many
years; now I'll demand it of myself."

PART IV. THORPE'S DREAM GIRL

Chapter XXXVII

The moment had struck for the woman. Thorpe did not know it, but it was
true. A solitary, brooding life in the midst of grand surroundings, an
active, strenuous life among great responsibilities, a starved,
hungry life of the affections whence even the sister had withdrawn her
love,--all these had worked unobtrusively towards the formation of a
single psychological condition. Such a moment comes to every man. In it
he realizes the beauties, the powers, the vastnesses which unconsciously
his being has absorbed. They rise to the surface as a need, which,
being satisfied, is projected into the visible world as an ideal to be
worshipped. Then is happiness and misery beside which the mere struggle
to dominate men becomes trivial, the petty striving with the forces of
nature seems a little thing. And the woman he at that time meets
takes on the qualities of the dream; she is more than woman, less than
goddess; she is the best of that man made visible.

Thorpe found himself for the first time filled with the spirit of
restlessness. His customary iron evenness of temper was gone, so that he
wandered quickly from one detail of his work to another, without seeming
to penetrate below the surface-need of any one task. Out of the present
his mind was always escaping to a mystic fourth dimension which he did
not understand. But a week before, he had felt himself absorbed in the
component parts of his enterprise, the totality of which arched far
over his head, shutting out the sky. Now he was outside of it. He had,
without his volition, abandoned the creator's standpoint of the god
at the heart of his work. It seemed as important, as great to him, but
somehow it had taken on a strange solidarity, as though he had left it
a plastic beginning and returned to find it hardened into the shapes of
finality. He acknowledged it admirable,--and wondered how he had ever
accomplished it! He confessed that it should be finished as it had
begun,--and could not discover in himself the Titan who had watched over
its inception.

Thorpe took this state of mind much to heart, and in combating it
expended more energy than would have sufficed to accomplish the