"I wish I could stop crying. But it's just too wonderful to work with people like this. I've been a bookkeeper in dozens of offices—everybody selfish and hating each other and trying to get on. I've seen so much of the other. It's hard for me to believe in this.
"I don't know much about Socialism," she went on. "I ain't educated like you young people; I haven't read very much. Keeping books all day is all my eyes are good for. But I just know it's right. If it wasn't the real thing, there'd never be a paper like this. How can you sit there so calm and cold and not cry? It's the biggest thing in the world, and we're part of it."
Yetta put her arms about the older woman.
"I love it, too," she said. "But it doesn't make me cry. Somehow it's too big for me. It matters so little whether I'm part of it or not. It would go on just the same—if I wasn't here. It isn't mine. I could cry over a little baby—if it was mine. But not over this—"
She was surprised to find that her tears were contradicting her words. Once started, it was hard to stop. It seemed very sad to her that a young woman of twenty-three should have nothing more personal to cry over.
CHAPTER XXIX WALTER'S HAVEN
While all these things were happening to Yetta, Walter was settling down into the rut of University life easily—almost contentedly. He was employed to be a scholar rather than a teacher. And while conducting classes is always a dismal task, study—to one with any bent that way—is a pleasant occupation. He was not dependent on his salary, and so escaped from the picturesque discomfort of the quarters assigned to him in the mediæval college building, to a "garden cottage." There was a lodge in front and a lawn running down to the river behind. He had found an excellent cook, who was married to an indifferent gardener. And, although his lawn was not so smooth nor his grape crop so plentiful as his neighbors', he was very pleasantly installed.
Sometimes, of course, he thought regretfully of the might-have-been life in New York. But the more he studied the Haktites, the more interesting they became. He had also revived his project of a Synthetic Philosophy.