His voice grew dreamy—­ceased, as if that peace were indeed too utter for words.  Then with an effort he resumed: 

“But after a while the world began to rumble in my ears.  A man can’t cut himself off from it forever.  God has well seen to that!  As the message cleared in my mind, there grew a need to give it out.  This seemed easy off there.  The little puzzles that the world makes so much of solved themselves for me.  I saw them to be puzzles of the world’s own creating—­all artificial—­all built up—­fashioned clumsily enough from man’s brute fear of the half-God, half-devil he has always made in his own image.

“But now that I’m here, Nance, I find myself already a little bewildered.  The solution of the puzzles is as simple as ever, but the puzzles themselves are more complex as I come closer to them—­so complex that my simple answer will seem only a vague absurdity.”

He paused and she felt his eyes upon her—­felt that he had turned from his abstractions to look at her more personally.

“Even since meeting you, Nance,” he went on with an odd, inward note in his voice, “I’ve been wondering if Hoover could by some chance have been right.  When I left, Hoover said I was a fool—­a certain common variety of fool.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re not—­at least, not the common kind.  I dare say that a man must be a certain kind of fool to think he can put the world forward by leaps and bounds.  I think he must be a fool to assume that the world wants truth when it wants only to be assured that it has already found the truth for itself.  The man who tells it what it already believes is never called a fool—­and perhaps he isn’t.  Indeed, I’ve come to think he is less than a fool—­that he’s a mere polite echo.  But oh, Bernal, hold to your truth!  Be the simple fool and worry the wise in the cages they have built around themselves.”

She was leaning eagerly forward, forgetful of all save that her starved need was feasting royally.

“Don’t give up; don’t parrot the commoner fool’s conceits back to him for the sake of his solemn approval.  Let those of his kind give him what he wants, while you meet those who must have more.  I’m one of them, Bernal.  At this moment I honestly don’t know whether I’m a bad woman or a good one.  And I’m frightened—­I’m so defenseless!  Some little soulless circumstance may make me decisively good or bad—­and I don’t want to be bad!  But give me what I want—­I must have that, regardless of what it makes me.”

He was silent for a time, then at last spoke: 

“I used to think you were a rebel, Nance.  Your eyes betrayed it, and the corners of your mouth went up the least little bit, as if they’d go further up before they went down—­as if you’d laugh away many solemn respectabilities.  But that’s not bad.  There are more things to laugh at than are dreamed of.  That’s Hoover’s entire creed, by the way.”

She remembered the name from that old tale of Caleb Webster’s.