“Why do you always look at things with such dreadfully practical eyes?” she interrupted.

“Because I’ve been studying evolution, I guess.  It’s only recently that I got my eyesight, if the truth were told.”

“But it seems to me you lose sight of beauty by being so practical, that you destroy beauty like the boys who catch butterflies and rub the down off their beautiful wings.”

He shook his head.

“Beauty has significance, but I never knew its significance before.  I just accepted beauty as something meaningless, as something that was just beautiful without rhyme or reason.  I did not know anything about beauty.  But now I know, or, rather, am just beginning to know.  This grass is more beautiful to me now that I know why it is grass, and all the hidden chemistry of sun and rain and earth that makes it become grass.  Why, there is romance in the life-history of any grass, yes, and adventure, too.  The very thought of it stirs me.  When I think of the play of force and matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel as if I could write an epic on the grass.

“How well you talk,” she said absently, and he noted that she was looking at him in a searching way.

He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, the blood flushing red on his neck and brow.

“I hope I am learning to talk,” he stammered.  “There seems to be so much in me I want to say.  But it is all so big.  I can’t find ways to say what is really in me.  Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman.  I feel—­oh, I can’t describe it—­I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child.  It is a great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the selfsame feeling and sensation.  It is a lordly task.  See, I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies.  It is a breath of the universe I have breathed.  I know song and laughter, and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I would like to tell them to you, to the world.  But how can I?  My tongue is tied.  I have tried, by the spoken word, just now, to describe to you the effect on me of the scent of the grass.  But I have not succeeded.  I have no more than hinted in awkward speech.  My words seem gibberish to me.  And yet I am stifled with desire to tell.  Oh!—­” he threw up his hands with a despairing gesture—­“it is impossible!  It is not understandable!  It is incommunicable!”