"Wells, I guess, and Tolstoi, and a man named Edward Carpenter. I've
been reading for over a year now--on a few lines, on what I consider the
essential lines."

"Poetry?"

"Well, frankly, not what you call poetry, or for your reasons--you two
write, of course, and look at things differently. Whitman is the man
that attracts me."

"Whitman?"

"Yes; he's a definite ethical force."

"Well, I'm ashamed to say that I'm a blank on the subject of Whitman.
How about you, Tom?"

Tom nodded sheepishly.

"Well," continued Burne, "you may strike a few poems that are tiresome,
but I mean the mass of his work. He's tremendous--like Tolstoi. They
both look things in the face, and, somehow, different as they are, stand
for somewhat the same things."

"You have me stumped, Burne," Amory admitted. "I've read 'Anna Karenina'
and the 'Kreutzer Sonata' of course, but Tolstoi is mostly in the
original Russian as far as I'm concerned."

"He's the greatest man in hundreds of years," cried Burne
enthusiastically. "Did you ever see a picture of that shaggy old head of
his?"

They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when
Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow with ideas
and a sense of shock that some one else had discovered the path he might
have followed. Burne Holiday was so evidently developing--and Amory
had considered that he was doing the same. He had fallen into a deep
cynicism over what had crossed his path, plotted the imperfectability of
man and read Shaw and Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges
of decadence--now suddenly all his mental processes of the last year and
a half seemed stale and futile--a petty consummation of himself... and
like a sombre background lay that incident of the spring before, that
filled half his nights with a dreary terror and made him unable to pray.
He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that
he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet
was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature
as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram,
with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals--a Catholicism which
Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or sacraments or
sacrifice.

He could not sleep, so he turned on his reading-lamp and, taking down
the "Kreutzer Sonata," searched it carefully for the germs of Burne's
enthusiasm. Being