al--this--this miserable unfair way things are done in the world. O my
dear, my dear, it's because I love you so, it's because I know now what
love really is that it hurts to see--" He took her face in his hands
caressingly, and tried to put an added tenderness into his voice that
his affection might blunt the sharpness of his words.

"Well, it's nonsense I tell you! Look here, Laura, if there is a God,
he's put those dagos and ignorant foreigners down there to work; just as
he's put the fish in the sea to be caught, and the beasts of the field
to be eaten, and it's none of my business to ask why! My job is
myself--myself and you! I refuse to bear burdens for people. I love you
with all the intensity of my nature--but it's my nature--not human
nature--not any common, socialized, diluted love; it's individual and
it's forever between you and me! What do I care for the rest of the
world! And if you love me as you will some day, you'll love me so that
they can't set you off mooning about other people's troubles. I tell
you, Laura, I'm going to make you love me so you can't think of anything
day or night but me--and what I am to you! That's my idea of love! It's
individual, intimate, restricted, qualified and absolutely personal--and
some day you'll see that!"

As he tripped down the hill from the Nesbit home that spring night, he
wondered what Laura Nesbit meant when she spoke of Grant Adams, and his
love for the motherless baby. The idea that this love bore any sort of
resemblance to the love of educated, cultivated people as found in the
love that Laura and her intended husband bore toward each other, puzzled
the young lawyer. Being restless, he turned off his homeward route, and
walked under the freshly leaved trees. Over and over again the foolish
phrases and sentences from Laura Nesbit's love making, many other nights
in which she seemed to assume the unquestioned truth of the hypothesis
of God, also puzzled him. Whatever his books had taught him, and
whatever life had taught him, convinced him that God was a polite word
for explaining one's failure. Yet, here was a woman whose mind he had to
respect, using the term as a proved theorem. He looked at the stars,
wheeling about with the monstrous pulleys of gravitation and attraction,
and the certain laws of motion. A moment later he looked southward in
the sky to that flaming, raging, splotched patch where the blue and
green and yellow flames from the smelters and the b