ll back again on the Eternal; between
the soul and God, he had learned in his deepest agony, there is room for
nothing more impregnable than the illusion of self. As Roger Adams--as a
mere separate existence, he was a failure. The things which he had
desired in life he had not possessed; the things which he had possessed
he had ceased very soon, in any vital sense, to desire. Of his life's
work, so big at the beginning, he saw now that he had made but a small
achievement--a volume of essays on the writings of other men and a few
years editing of a magazine which had absorbed his strength without
yielding him the smallest return of fame. On every side, from all
avenues of hope or of mere impulse, there had crowded upon him, he
admitted smiling, but disappointment and disillusion. He had played for
happiness as every man plays for it from the cradle, he had staked his
throw as boldly, he had made his resolves as desperately, as any of his
fellows, and yet at the end of his forty years he had not a single
object to put forward as his reward. Nothing remained to him! As the
world counts success he could show only failure.

But the larger vision was still before him, and he knew that all these
thoughts were the cheapest falsehood. In spite of appearances, in spite
of the outward emptiness of his existence, he had not failed; and in the
hour that he had put life aside he had for the first time in his whole
experience begun really to live. In surrendering his own small
individual being he knew that he had entered into the possession of a
being immeasurably larger than his own.

He looked at the fruit vender smiling, and the man's answering smile
came to him like the clasp of fellowship. "Did he, too, understand?" was
Adams' unspoken question, "had he, also, found the key that unlocked his
prison?" and there flowed into his heart something of the rapture with
which Laura had cried: "I've grown to the light!" In each exclamation
there was ecstasy, but in hers it was the short, troubled ecstasy of the
senses, which hears its doom even in the hour of its own fulfilment;
while from his finer joy there shone forth that radiant energy, in which
is both warmth and light, both rest and action, which illumines not only
the soul within, but transfigures and refines the mere dull ordinary
facts of life.

As he stood there the car passed him again, and Laura and Kemper both
turned, smiling, to look back at him. When Laura's long white ve