never used them. I've brains, too, but I've always managed to
keep them tied down--buckled to the farm, to investments, and
work--thinking about things that make us forget life. It's all
dust and dust, with rain once in a while, only the rain steams
off and it's dust again."

Martin began to review the course of his own past, and smiled
bitterly. Others were able to live the same kind of an existence,
but, unlike himself, took it as a preparation for another day,
another existence which, it seemed to him, was measured and cut
to order by professionals who understood how to fix up the
meaning of life so that it would soothe and satisfy. He thought
how much better it was to be a dumb, unquestioning beast, or a
human being conscious of his soul, than to be as he was--alone, a
materialist, who saw the meaninglessness of matter and whose
mind, in some manner which he did not understand, had developed a
slant that made him doubt what others accepted so easily as
facts. Martin knew he was bound to things of substance but he
followed the lure of property and accumulation as he might have
followed some other game had he learned it, knowing all along
that it was a delusion and at the same time acknowledging that
for him there was nothing else as sufficing.

How simple, if Bill's future could be a settled thing in his mind
as it was to the boy's mother. Or his own future! If only he
could believe--then how different it would be for him. He could
go on placidly and die with a smile. But he could not believe.
His atheism was both mental and instinctive. It was something he
could not understand, and which he knew he could never change,
try as he might. Take this very evening. Here was death in his