Here indeed was another sign of the times, to find in a strictly scientific work a sentence truly religious!  As I continued to read these works, I found them suffused with religion, religion of a kind and quality I had not imagined.  The birthright of the spirit of man was freedom, freedom to experiment, to determine, to create—­to create himself, to create society in the image of God!  Spiritual creation the function of cooperative man through the coming ages, the task that was to make him divine.  Here indeed was the germ of a new sanction, of a new motive, of a new religion that strangely harmonized with the concepts of the old—­once the dynamic power of these was revealed.

I had been thinking of my family—­of my family in terms of Matthew—­and yet with a growing yearning that embraced them all.  I had not informed Maude of my illness, and I had managed to warn Tom Peters not to do so.  I had simply written her that after the campaign I had gone for a rest to California; yet in her letters to me, after this information had reached her, I detected a restrained anxiety and affection that troubled me.  Sequences of words curiously convey meanings and implications that transcend their literal sense, true thoughts and feelings are difficult to disguise even in written speech.  Could it be possible after all that had happened that Maude still loved me?  I continually put the thought away from me, but continually it returned to haunt me.  Suppose Maude could not help loving me, in spite of my weaknesses and faults, even as I loved Nancy in spite of hers?  Love is no logical thing.

It was Matthew I wanted, Matthew of whom I thought, and trivial, long-forgotten incidents of the past kept recurring to me constantly.  I still received his weekly letters; but he did not ask why, since I had taken a vacation, I had not come over to them.  He represented the medium, the link between Maude and me that no estrangement, no separation could break.

All this new vision of mine was for him, for the coming generation, the soil in which it must be sown, the Americans of the future.  And who so well as Matthew, sensitive yet brave, would respond to it?  I wished not only to give him what I had begun to grasp, to study with him, to be his companion and friend, but to spare him, if possible, some of my own mistakes and sufferings and punishments.  But could I go back?  Happy coincidences of desires and convictions had been so characteristic of that other self I had been struggling to cast off:  I had so easily been persuaded, when I had had a chance of getting Nancy, that it was the right thing to do!  And now, in my loneliness, was I not growing just as eager to be convinced that it was my duty to go back to the family which in the hour of self-sufficiency I had cast off?  I had believed in divorce then—­why not now?  Well, I still believed in it.  I had thought of a union with Nancy as something that would bring about the “self-realization that