"It
quickened with ambition under the dreary downpour of last winter, fought
the violent early spring, flowered, and lured the insects and the bees,
scattered its seeds, squared itself with its duty and the world, and--"

"Why do you always look at things with such dreadfully practical eyes?"
she interrupted.

"Because I've been studying evolution, I guess. It's only recently that
I got my eyesight, if the truth were told."

"But it seems to me you lose sight of beauty by being so practical, that
you destroy beauty like the boys who catch butterflies and rub the down
off their beautiful wings."

He shook his head.

"Beauty has significance, but I never knew its significance before. I
just accepted beauty as something meaningless, as something that was just
beautiful without rhyme or reason. I did not know anything about beauty.
But now I know, or, rather, am just beginning to know. This grass is
more beautiful to me now that I know why it is grass, and all the hidden
chemistry of sun and rain and earth that makes it become grass. Why,
there is romance in the life-history of any grass, yes, and adventure,
too. The very thought of it stirs me. When I think of the play of force
and matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel as if I could
write an epic on the grass.

"How well you talk," she said absently, and he noted that she was looking
at him in a searching way.

He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, the blood flushing
red on his neck and brow.

"I hope I am learning to talk," he stammered. "There seems to be so much
in me I want to say. But it is all so big. I can't find ways to say
what is really in me. Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all
life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring
for me to be the spokesman. I feel--oh, I can't describe it--I feel the
bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child. It is a
great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or
spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself
back into the selfsame feeling and sensation. It is a lordly task. See,
I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils
sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies. It is a breath
of the universe I have breathed. I know song and laughter, and success
and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions that arise in my
brain some