dark--so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead,
and let it look out at me--I let it play stray dog or escaped convict
or ghost, and then saw myself coming along the road. That made it all
right--as it always makes everything all right to project yourself
completely into another's place. I knew that if I were the dog or the
convict or the ghost I wouldn't be a menace to Burne Holiday any more
than he was a menace to me. Then I thought of my watch. I'd better go
back and leave it and then essay the woods. No; I decided, it's
better on the whole that I should lose a watch than that I should turn
back--and I did go into them--not only followed the road through them,
but walked into them until I wasn't frightened any more--did it until
one night I sat down and dozed off in there; then I knew I was through
being afraid of the dark."

"Lordy," Amory breathed. "I couldn't have done that. I'd have come out
half-way, and the first time an automobile passed and made the dark
thicker when its lamps disappeared, I'd have come in."

"Well," Burne said suddenly, after a few moments' silence, "we're
half-way through, let's turn back."

On the return he launched into a discussion of will.

"It's the whole thing," he asserted. "It's the one dividing line between
good and evil. I've never met a man who led a rotten life and didn't
have a weak will."

"How about great criminals?"

"They're usually insane. If not, they're weak. There is no such thing as
a strong, sane criminal."

"Burne, I disagree with you altogether; how about the superman?"

"Well?"

"He's evil, I think, yet he's strong and sane."

"I've never met him. I'll bet, though, that he's stupid or insane."

"I've met him over and over and he's neither. That's why I think you're
wrong."

"I'm sure I'm not--and so I don't believe in imprisonment except for the
insane."

On this point Amory could not agree. It seemed to him that life
and history were rife with the strong criminal, keen, but often
self-deluding; in politics and business one found him and among the
old statesmen and kings and generals; but Burne never agreed and their
courses began to split on that point.

Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He
resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and
walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate
lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather
p