the feminine mind tended naturally toward a
material philosophy--toward a deification of the body, a faith in the
fugitive allurement of the senses, and because of his earlier initiation
he had taken Laura's intellectual radiance as the shining of a virtually
disembodied spirit. His own senses had led him, he recognised now, to
disastrous issues; his love for Connie had been the prompting of mere
physical impulse, and he had emerged from it with a feeling of escaping
into freedom. Too much Nature he had learned during those months of
mental apathy is in its way quite as destructive as too little--there
must be a soul in desire to keep it alive, he understood at last, or the
perishing body of it will decay for lack of a vital flame in the very
hour of its fulfilment. A colder man might have come to such knowledge
along impersonal paths, a coarser one would never have gone beyond it,
but in Adams the old fighting spirit--a survival of the uncompromising
Puritan conscience--had brought him up again, soul and body, to struggle
afresh for a cleaner and a sharper air. Life had meant more to him in
the beginning than a mere series of sensations--more even than any
bodily conditions, any material attainment; and it was the final triumph
of his austere vision that it should mean most of all when it seemed to
a casual glance to contain least of actual value.

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH A YOUNG MAN DREAMS DREAMS

Since coming to New York Mrs. Trent had taken a small apartment in a big
apartment house, where she lived with her son a perfectly provincial as
well as a strictly secluded life. She was a large, florid, motherly old
lady who still wore mourning for a husband who had been killed while fox
hunting twenty-five years ago. Her face resembled a friendly and
auspicious full moon, and above it her shining hair rolled like a
parting of silvery clouds. Day or night she was always engaged in
knitting a purple shawl, which appeared never to have been finished
since her son's infancy, for his earliest recollection was of the plump,
soft balls of brilliant yarn and the long ivory knitting needles which
clicked briskly while she worked with a pleasant, familiar sound. To
this day the clicking of those needles brought to his mouth the taste of
large slices of bread and jam, and to his ears the soothing murmur of
Bible stories told in the twilight.

She was always, too, serene gossip that she was, full of a monotonous,
rippling str