t get lost easily. I have the bump of
location. I usually know where I'm at - What's wrong now?«
    »Don't say where I'm at.«
    »That's right,« he said gratefully, »where I am. But where am I at - I mean,
where am I? Oh, yes, in the chart-room. Well, some people -«
    »Persons,« she corrected.
    »Some persons need guides, most persons do; but I think I can get along
without them. I've spent a lot of time in the chart-room now, and I'm on the
edge of knowing my way about, what charts I want to refer to, what coasts I want
to explore. And from the way I line it up, I'll explore a whole lot more quickly
by myself. The speed of a fleet, you know, is the speed of the slowest ship, and
the speed of the teachers is affected the same way. They can't go any faster
than the ruck of their scholars, and I can set a faster pace for myself than
they set for a whole schoolroom.«
    »He travels the fastest who travels alone,« she quoted at him.
    But I'd travel faster with you just the same, was what he wanted to blurt
out, as he caught a vision of a world without end of sunlit spaces and starry
voids through which he drifted with her, his arm around her, her pale gold hair
blowing about his face. In the same instant he was aware of the pitiful
inadequacy of speech. God! If he could so frame words that she could see what he
then saw! And he felt the stir in him, like a throe of yearning pain, of the
desire to paint these visions that flashed unsummoned on the mirror of his mind.
Ah, that was it! He caught at the hem of the secret. It was the very thing that
the great writers and master-poets did. That was why they were giants. They knew
how to express what they thought, and felt, and saw. Dogs asleep in the sun
often whined and barked, but they were unable to tell what they saw that made
them whine and bark. He had often wondered what it was. And that was all he was,
a dog asleep in the sun. He saw noble and beautiful visions, but he could only
whine and bark at Ruth. But he would cease sleeping in the sun. He would