When Graham reached his room he was in no mood for sleep. At first he
lapsed into a long revery over the events of the evening, trivial in
themselves, and yet for some reason holding a controlling influence
over his thoughts. Miss St. John was a new revelation of womanhood to
him, and for the first time in his life his heart had been stirred by
a woman's tones and glances. A deep chord in his nature vibrated when
she spoke and smiled. What did it mean? He had followed his impulse to
permit this stranger to make any impression within her power, and he
found that she had decidedly interested him. As he tried to analyze
her power he concluded that it lay chiefly in the mirthfulness, the
joyousness of her spirit. She quickened his cool, deliberate pulse.
Her smile was not an affair of facial muscles, but had a vivifying
warmth. It made him suspect that his life was becoming cold and self-
centred, that he was missing the deepest and best experiences of an
existence that was brief indeed at best, and, as he believed, soon
ceased forever. The love of study and ambition had sufficed thus far,
but actuated by his own materialistic creed he was bound to make the
most of life while it lasted. According to Emerson he was as yet but
in the earlier stages of evolution, and his highest manhood wholly
undeveloped. Had not "music, poetry, and art" dawned in his mind? Was
nature but a mechanism after whose laws he had been groping like an
anatomist who finds in the godlike form bone and tissue merely? As he
had sat watching the sunset a few hours previous, the element of
beauty had been present to him as never before. Could this sense of
beauty become so enlarged that the world would be transfigured,
"radiant with purple light"? Morning had often brought to him
weariness from sleepless hours during which he had racked his brain
over problems too deep for him, and evening had found him still
baffled, disappointed, and disposed to ask in view of his toil, _Cui