material philosophy--toward a deification of the body, a faith in the
fugitive allurement of the senses, and because of his earlier initiation
he had taken Laura's intellectual radiance as the shining of a virtually
disembodied spirit. His own senses had led him, he recognised now, to
disastrous issues; his love for Connie had been the prompting of mere
physical impulse, and he had emerged from it with a feeling of escaping
into freedom. Too much Nature he had learned during those months of
mental apathy is in its way quite as destructive as too little--there
must be a soul in desire to keep it alive, he understood at last, or the
perishing body of it will decay for lack of a vital flame in the very
hour of its fulfilment. A colder man might have come to such knowledge
along impersonal paths, a coarser one would never have gone beyond it,
but in Adams the old fighting spirit--a survival of the uncompromising
Puritan conscience--had brought him up again, soul and body, to struggle
afresh for a cleaner and a sharper air. Life had meant more to him in
the beginning than a mere series of sensations--more even than any
bodily conditions, any material attainment; and it was the final triumph
of his austere vision that it should mean most of all when it seemed to
a casual glance to contain least of actual value.




CHAPTER V

IN WHICH A YOUNG MAN DREAMS DREAMS


Since coming to New York Mrs. Trent had taken a small apartment in a big
apartment house, where she lived with her son a perfectly provincial as