THE WORLD ALONE

     I The Length of a Thousand Yards
    II The Evening and the Morning Were the First Day
   III Rose Keeps the Path
   IV The Girl With the Bad Voice
    V Mrs. Goldsmith’s Taste
   VI A Business Proposition
  VII The End of a Fixed Idea
 VIII Success—­and a Recognition
   IX The Man and the Director
    X The Voice of the World
   XI The Short Circuit Again
  XII “I’m All Alone”
 XIII Frederica’s Paradox
  XIV The Miry Way
   XV In Flight
  XVI Anti-Climax
 XVII The End of the Tour
XVIII The Conquest of Centropolis

BOOK IV

THE REAL ADVENTURE

    I The Tune Changes
   II A Broken Parallel
  III Friends
   IV Couleur-de-rose
    V The Beginning

BOOK ONE

The Great Illusion

CHAPTER I

A POINT OF DEPARTURE

“Indeed,” continued the professor, glancing demurely down at his notes, “if one were the editor of a column of—­er advice to young girls, such as I believe is to be found, along with the household hints and the dress patterns, on the ladies’ page of most of our newspapers—­if one were the editor of such a column, he might crystallize the remarks I have been making this morning into a warning—­never marry a man with a passion for principles.”

It drew a laugh, of course.  Professorial jokes never miss fire.  But the girl didn’t laugh.  She came to with a start—­she had been staring out the window—­and wrote, apparently, the fool thing down in her note-book.  It was the only note she had made in thirty-five minutes.

All of his brilliant exposition of the paradox of Rousseau and Robespierre (he was giving a course on the French Revolution), the strange and yet inevitable fact that the softest, most sentimental, rose-scented religion ever invented, should have produced, through its most thoroughly infatuated disciple, the ghastliest reign of terror that ever shocked the world; his masterly character study of the “sea-green incorruptible,” too humane to swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of France to the guillotine in order that the half that was left might believe unanimously in the rights of man; all this the girl had let go by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a street piano, which came in through the open window on the prematurely warm March wind.  Of all his philosophizing, there was not a pen-track to mar the virginity of the page she had opened her note-book to when the lecture began.

And then, with a perfectly serious face, she had written down his silly little joke about advice to young girls.

There was no reason in the world why she should be The Girl.  There were fifteen or twenty of them in the class along with about as many men.  And, partly because there was no reason for his paying any special attention to her, it annoyed him frightfully that he did.