er, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked
its way.

"Vulnerable--under the law--even as we! The Cones!

"Go!" he gasped. A tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed.

"Martin! Brother," wept Ruth. I thrust my hand into his breast; felt
the heart beating, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakable
strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a
beleaguered citadel.

But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had
withdrawn into that subjective void in which he had said he floated--a
lonely sentient atom, his one line of communication with us cut; severed
from us as completely as though he were, as he had described it, outside
space.

And Drake and I looked at each other's eyes, neither daring to be first
to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seemed to
be the sorrowful soul.

CHAPTER XIV. "FREE! BUT A MONSTER!"

The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the
refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh
intolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting
phenomena of our psychology.

It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through
precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective
coloration--the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so
cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle,
the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all
that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so
astonishingly developed in the late war.

Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a
jungle--the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the
thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to
death.

And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and
literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and
cultivation--shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary.

On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves
hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts--or so he thinks.

Outside them lie the wildernesses and the gardens of the unknown, and
man's little trails are but rabbit-runs in an illimitable forest.

But they are home to him!

Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation,
some storm of emotion, some strength-testing struggle, back into the
shelter of the ob