“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 stand up, with open eyes, and he would struggle and toil and learn until, with eyes unblinded and tongue untied, he could share with her his visioned wealth.  Other men had discovered the trick of expression, of making words obedient servitors, and of making combinations of words mean more than the sum of their separate meanings.  He was stirred profoundly by the passing glimpse at the secret, and he was again caught up in the vision of sunlit spaces and starry voids—­until it came to him that it was very quiet, and he saw Ruth regarding him with an amused expression and a smile in her eyes.

“I have had a great visioning,” he said, and at the sound of his words in his own ears his heart gave a leap.  Where had those words come from?  They had adequately expressed the pause his vision had put in the conversation.  It was a miracle.  Never had he so loftily framed a lofty thought.  But never had he attempted to frame lofty thoughts in words.  That was it.  That