the path to the hidden temple but has not followed it; who has,
perhaps, caught glimpses of the temple and striven afterward to convince himself
that it was only a mirage of foliage. Yet another way. A man who could have done
things but who placed no value on the doing, and who, all the time, in his
innermost heart, is regretting that he has not done them; who has secretly
laughed at the rewards for doing, and yet, still more secretly, has yearned for
the rewards and for the joy of doing.«
    »I don't read him that way,« she said. »And for that matter, I don't see
just what you mean.«
    »It is only a vague feeling on my part,« Martin temporized. »I have no
reason for it. It is only a feeling, and most likely it is wrong. You certainly
should know him better than I.«
    From the evening at Ruth's Martin brought away with him strange confusions
and conflicting feelings. He was disappointed in his goal, in the persons he had
climbed to be with. On the other hand, he was encouraged with his success. The
climb had been easier than he expected. He was superior to the climb, and (he
did not, with false modesty, hide it from himself) he was superior to the beings
among whom he had climbed - with the exception, of course, of Professor
Caldwell. About life and the books he knew more than they, and he wondered into
what nooks and crannies they had cast aside their educations. He did not know
that he was himself possessed of unusual brain vigor; nor did he know that the
persons who were given to probing the depths and to thinking ultimate thoughts
were not to be found in the drawing rooms of the world's Morses; nor did he
dream that such persons were as lonely eagles sailing solitary in the azure sky
far above the earth and its swarming freight of gregarious life.
 

                                 Chapter XXVIII

But success had lost Martin's address, and her messengers no longer came to his
door. For twenty-five days, working Sundays and holidays, he toiled on »The
Shame of the Sun,« a long essay of some thirty thousand words. It was a
deliberate attack on the mysticism of the Maeterlinck school - an attack from
the citadel of positive science upon the wonder-dreamers, but an attack
nevertheless that retained much of beauty and wonder of the sort compatible with
ascertained fact. It was a little later that he followed up the attack with