breath and a feeling of religious awe,
went through the laboratories, saw demonstrations, and listened to a physics
professor lecturing to his classes.
    But he did not neglect his writing. A stream of short stories flowed from
his pen, and he branched out into the easier forms of verse - the kind he saw
printed in the magazines - though he lost his head and wasted two weeks on a
tragedy in blank verse, the swift rejection of which, by half a dozen magazines,
dumfounded him. Then he discovered Henley and wrote a series of sea-poems on the
model of »Hospital Sketches.« They were simple poems, of light and color, and
romance and adventure. »Sea Lyrics,« he called them, and he judged them to be
the best work he had yet done. There were thirty, and he completed them in a
month, doing one a day after having done his regular day's work on fiction,
which day's work was the equivalent to a week's work of the average successful
writer. The toil meant nothing to him. It was not toil. He was finding speech,
and all the beauty and wonder that had been pent for years behind his
inarticulate lips was now pouring forth in a wild and virile flood.
    He showed the »Sea Lyrics« to no one, not even to the editors. He had become
distrustful of editors. But it was not distrust that prevented him from
submitting the »Lyrics.« They were so beautiful to him that he was impelled to
save them to share with Ruth in some glorious, far-off time when he would dare
to read to her what he had written. Against that time he kept them with him,
reading them aloud, going over them until he knew them by heart.
    He lived every moment of his waking hours, and he lived in his sleep, his
subjective mind rioting through his five hours of surcease and combining the
thoughts and events of the day into grotesque and impossible marvels. In
reality, he never rested, and a weaker body or a less firmly poised brain would
have been prostrated in a general break-down. His late afternoon calls on Ruth
were rarer now, for June was approaching, when she would take her degree and
finish with the university. Bachelor of Arts! - when he thought of her degree,
it seemed she fled beyond him faster than he could pursue.
    One afternoon a week she gave to him, and arriving late, he usually stayed
for dinner and for music afterward. Those were his red-letter days. The
atmosphere