Ruth’s face brightened.

“Tell me about him,” she urged.  “Not what is large and brilliant—­I know those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse.  I am most curious to know.”

“Perhaps I’ll get myself in a pickle.”  Martin debated humorously for a moment.  “Suppose you tell me first.  Or maybe you find in him nothing less than the best.”

“I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for two years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression.”

“Bad impression, you mean?  Well, here goes.  He is all the fine things you think about him, I guess.  At least, he is the finest specimen of intellectual man I have met; but he is a man with a secret shame.”

“Oh, no, no!” he hastened to cry.  “Nothing paltry nor vulgar.  What I mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the bottom of things, and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes believe to himself that he never saw it.  Perhaps that’s not the clearest way to express it.  Here’s another way.  A man who has found 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