he truth."

"It has a philosophical bearing, too."

"Perhaps. But that wasn't my object. Thank God, I am a writer, and
not a thinker."

And he continued to travesty the truth, and I was impotent--the truth,
that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my
eyes, and whose taste was in my mouth.

Was I so utterly forsaken? Would no one speak the word I was in search
of?

. . . . .

The Room was flooded with moonlight. In that magnificent setting there
was an obscure white couple, two silent human beings with marble faces.

The fire was out. The clock had finished its work and had stopped, and
was listening with its heart.

The man's face dominated. The woman was at his feet. They did
nothing. An air of tenderness hovered over them. They looked like
monuments gazing at the moon.

He spoke. I recognised his voice. It lit up his face for me, which
had been shrouded from my sight before. It was /he,/ the nameless
lover and poet whom I had seen twice before.

He was telling Amy that on his way that evening he had met a poor
woman, with her baby in her arms.

She walked, jostled and borne along by the crowd returning home from
work, and finally was tossed aside up against a post under a porch, and
stopped as though nailed there.

"I went up to her," he said, "and saw she was smiling.

. . . . .

"What was she smiling at? At life, on account of her child. Under the
refuge where she was cowering, facing the setting sun, she was thinking
of the growth of her child in the days to come. However terrible they
might be, they would be around him, for him, in him. They would be the
same thing as her breath, her walk, her look.

"So profound was the smile of this creator who bore her burden and who
raised her head and gazed into the sun, without even looking down at
the child or listening to its babbling.

"I worked this woman and child up into a poem."

He remained motionless for a moment, then said gently without pausing,
in that voice from the Beyond which we assume when we recite, obeying
what we say and no longer mastering it:

"The woman from the depths of her rags, a waif, a martyr--smiled. She
must have a divine heart to be so tired and yet smile. She loved the
sky, the light, which the unformed little being would love some day.
She loved the chilly dawn, the sultry noontime, the dreamy evening.
The child would grow up, a saviour, to give life to everything again.
S