machinery to bring the
latent potentiality into action.

"Your ideas are no different now than then," she said at length, "except
that time has intensified them. You used to compare what you found in
books with what you found in life, to the distinct disadvantage of the
realities."

"Yes," Hamlen admitted; "and it is just as true to-day."

"Do you know why?" she demanded pointedly.

"Because life is so full of insincerity."

"No," she protested, "you are wrong, absolutely wrong. The real reason
lies in you. You have always given of yourself in your intellectual
pursuits, and have received in kind. In your relations with life you
have never given of yourself, and again you have received in kind.
Philip, Philip! why don't you study yourself as you do your books, and
even now learn the lesson you need to know?"

"Was that why--back there--" he began.

She paused for a moment as the conversation took her back to the earlier
days.

"You thought me changeable," she evaded the question; "but for that you
yourself were responsible. You drew me to you with irresistible force,
then repelled me by your intolerance of all those lighter interests
which were natural to youth of our age. Your letters stimulated my
ambition, your conversation stirred in me all that was best; but as soon
as we were separated I felt a lack which for a long time I was unable to
understand."

"Why did you come," he asked, "to awaken these memories I have tried so
hard to forget?" but she seemed not to hear him.

"Then I realized what a dream it was," she continued. "Music to you
meant canon and fugue, counterpoint and diminished sevenths; to me it
was the invitation to dance. You had no friends, and I was frightened
by your willingness to be alone. You had nothing in common with me
or my friends; you gave my heart nothing to feed upon except
intellect--intellect, and I found myself one moment beneath its hypnotic
influence, the next striving to break away from its oppression. Perhaps
this was what you had in mind, Philip, that we two run off to some
island such as this, to spend our lives in Utopia, alone except for
ourselves and your books."

"For me, that would have been all I could have asked."

"But no one, Philip, can live on that alone. We need to draw from our
companionship with others in order to give of it to each other. And you
forget"--she smiled mischievously--"that when Aristotle begins to bore
you he can be placed back upon t