Doctor Isaac Stein’s warm voice
startled me at my shoulder. “You have a fine power of concentration, Doctor Mark. I’ve been here
five minutes watching your immobile absorption.”

I turned and met the gray eyes of the great bio-chemist: of the man
whom of all Americans I admired most. “It is the contrary of concentration. My brain is split in two. And the
one part does not trouble the other.”

He nodded and frowned. “It’s the part of your brain which dwells so voluptuously with those
ganglions, that interests me.”

“I stand rebuked, sir.”

“You’ll learn that the other part which you think now so worthily
engaged in speculation and in rhapsody, is merely the part not yet in
solution--not at the point yet of true condensation. When you’re wholly
crystallized, Mark, then you’ll be _whole_.”

“You disapprove of me, Doctor Stein?”

He laughed. “You should know better than that.”

“You have the passion for unity of your race, sir.” I laughed back. “This faith in unity which your science posits is itself the creation
of a wild mystic rhapsody.”

“It is the premise of every human thought, of every human act.”

“--That has survived, since it fitted into the unitary scheme. But is
there not something arbitrary about that, Professor Stein? Two intense
single-minded peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews, set up a scale
of consciousness based on the Unit, and narrow down the multiverse
to that. Everything that men did or thought must fit that scale of
One, be translated into it: everything that failed was rejected, was
unrecorded, hence intellectually was nonexistent. To-day, after three
thousand years of this sort of selection, we have quite an array
of theory, data, thought, all in the key of One: we have a whole
civilization based on One, a whole set of religions tuned in One, to
which our senses as well as our minds submit and finally conform. What
does that prove beyond the thoroughness of the Greeks and Hebrews? of
their initial will to throw out all contrary evidence, to deny all
dimensions beyond it?”

“Could this premise of the Unity have builded up so wholly the
structure of science, æsthetic, logic ... the structure of human
action, were it but an arbitrary premise that might be replaced by
others at least as valid?”

“The strength of the limited, Doctor Stein: the protection of
exclusion.”

Doctor Stein’s eyes sharpened. “Very well. Then, does not the success of this premise, which you
call limiting and protective, prove that it expresses perfectly the
human essence? The fact that by means of the premise of unity man is
beginning to master life, does that not prove, besides, that man’s
essence and the essence of being are common terms, permitting a contact
after all between the subjective and objective, between the phenomenal
and the absolute?”

“You are assuming the success, Doctor Stein! And you are assuming that
this thing which man is ‘mastering’ is life: is something more than the
creation of the subjective will which started with the Unit that it
finds everywhere and thereby ‘masters’ ... finding and mastering only
and always itself. You are assuming that every day is not compounded
of events which transcend the powers of unitary logic and unitary
experience even to conceive them. How do we get out of the difficulty? From these parabola shapes that are the events, perhaps, of every day,
our minds snatch down the fragmentary intersections that touch the
terms of our minds. The rest is ignored. Your ‘success’ of biology,
mathematics, chemistry, physics, æsthetics, mechanics, is simply your
own dream, complacently rounded by your unitary will. Unchallenged,
for the most part, for the simple reason that long ago man’s mind has
lopped off whatever might have challenged.”

“Well, then, even you will admit that the human will is unitary.”

“And what does the will cover? how successful, how potent is the human
will? If it were not deeply at variance with Life, would our will
make mostly for anguish and for failure? Would it not be a bit more
competent than it is? Would history, social and personal, not be a
happier story?”

Professor Stein’s eyes were hot. “Come up some evening, Mark: any evening when I’m in town: we’ll go
into this.”

He left me. _j_

Clasping Mildred’s hand in the pied lobby, I touched a warm, proud
sorrow. She was changed ... deepened rather. In her great eyes, a new
limpidity: and more than ever the counterpoint of her bright hard body
and of her spirit, dark and profoundly still, gave to her a beauty
almost beyond my bearing. I gripped myself. I silenced my clamoring question: “Mildred, Mildred,
did you love him, then?” We sat, touching our food, saying no word,
until I had mastered myself. When I was able to speak:

“I went to his place this morning, and they let me in.”

Her eyes rose to mine and dwelt there quietly. “I saw his face, dead. Even in death it was noble. He must have been a
great man, Mildred.”

Her eyes assented, serenely. I made my eyes see only the loveliness of this girl: but perhaps my
mouth trembled with a jealous pain. “John,” she answered both my eyes and my mouth, “you are suffering too. You are afraid Philip’s death has given him an advantage over you--a
sort of perfection easier to love than your own struggling life. That’s
not true, John. Would I lunch with you in this gay place to-day, not
twenty-four hours after his death, if I responded in such a foolish way
to life? You are very dear to me, John: I know that also.”

I could not speak. So I took from my pocket the envelope and gave it
her, in silence. She examined it, turning it about. Her eyes met mine fully:

“How amazing! How amazing!” she whispered. “Where does this come from?”

“I found it on the floor not far from where he lay. It might have been
nearer, or have blown from its place on the desk. For the windows were
open. Why is it amazing?”

“Why? Because it is my hand. And because I did not write it.”

“Mildred, for the sake of our reason, be sure of what you say. You must
have written more than once to Philip.”

She paused: her teeth bit hard in her lower lip, a tremor of resolve
pushed up to her sharp shoulders. Then, in a quiet containment, she
answered me. “I make no mistake, John. I did write, infrequently, to Philip. I never
sent him a note by messenger. If I needed to communicate with him
quickly, I telephoned, or I wired.”

In her pause, the gilt bustle of the room where we were lunching,
the room itself, became a shallow and unreal line upon some darkling
density about us. Mildred went on:

“This is a fine version of my hand. But it is not my hand. And there
is more superficial evidence than my conviction, that it is not mine. _Did you notice the envelope_, John?”

Her hand on the table with its débris of crystal and porcelain and
silver was steady: mine, taking the paper, trembled. I looked, and my soul blanched: my hands seemed to crumple and collapse
about the flimsy paper. I fumbled at the flap.