ess--and a Recognition
IX The Man and the Director
X The Voice of the World
XI The Short Circuit Again
XII "I'm All Alone"
XIII Frederica's Paradox
XIV The Miry Way
XV In Flight
XVI Anti-Climax
XVII The End of the Tour
XVIII The Conquest of Centropolis

BOOK IV

THE REAL ADVENTURE

I The Tune Changes
II A Broken Parallel
III Friends
IV Couleur-de-rose
V The Beginning

BOOK ONE

The Great Illusion

CHAPTER I

A POINT OF DEPARTURE

"Indeed," continued the professor, glancing demurely down at his notes,
"if one were the editor of a column of--er advice to young girls, such
as I believe is to be found, along with the household hints and the
dress patterns, on the ladies' page of most of our newspapers--if one
were the editor of such a column, he might crystallize the remarks I
have been making this morning into a warning--never marry a man with a
passion for principles."

It drew a laugh, of course. Professorial jokes never miss fire. But
_the_ girl didn't laugh. She came to with a start--she had been staring
out the window--and wrote, apparently, the fool thing down in her
note-book. It was the only note she had made in thirty-five minutes.

All of his brilliant exposition of the paradox of Rousseau and
Robespierre (he was giving a course on the French Revolution), the
strange and yet inevitable fact that the softest, most sentimental,
rose-scented religion ever invented, should have produced, through its
most thoroughly infatuated disciple, the ghastliest reign of terror that
ever shocked the world; his masterly character study of the "sea-green
incorruptible," too humane to swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of
France to the guillotine in order that the half that was left might
believe unanimously in the rights of man; all this the girl had let go
by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a street piano, which
came in through the open window on the prematurely warm March wind. Of
all his philosophizing, there was not a pen-track to mar the virginity
of the page she had opened her note-book to when the lecture began.

And then, with a perfectly serious face, she had written down his silly
little joke about advice to young girls.

There was no reason in the world why she should be The Girl. There were
fifteen or twenty of them in the class along with about as many men.
And, partly because there was no reason for his paying any specia