He felt great comfort in Freda’s presence, greater, more mysterious comfort, than he had ever known before. Most women existed in an unreal atmosphere outside his own immediate consciousness. Most women were elusive phantasies of pure appearance, without content or meaning. But it had so happened that Freda’s dark eyes were able to pierce the zone of unreality and stab consciously into his being, even during the first hour of their acquaintance. It had so happened that the seeds of that first encounter found exceedingly fertile soil. His effort to exclude her from his mind had been just as futile as he considered it successful. He was indeed master of his conscious thoughts, but in the reservoirs of his being, this unusual girl had been living an unmolested life, free to come and go, to commune with him in mysterious, unheard conversations, to mingle her nature with his in hours when his subconscious self had fled with her beyond the limits of recognized experience. It was because this knowledge of her had been entirely buried that he now wondered at the comfort of her actual presence.
They talked on and on, forgetting the others in the room, and forgetting also the late hour. Together they described their common feelings of rebellion against university education. It was not ordained that either of them should realize, just then, how vast a principle underlay their sentiments. Neither of them was to play the role of interpreter to the other, to explain that rebellion was the necessary element of progress, that no man or woman ever changed through the successive metamorphoses of being who did not rebel against existing states. They were far from understanding it all. Mauney, burning with the pent-up indignation of the present hour, and Freda MacDowell, beautiful and vivid with the flush of full-hearted reciprocation. The hours sped. At last the game of poker broke up. At last the true rebels said good-night to each other and retired to sleepless beds.
CHAPTER V.
In Which Mauney Calls on the Professor.
Youth is liable to misconstrue the world and its heterogeneous motives. Being inordinately eager to fulfil its own pressing missions, it is prone to belittle the halting advice of more sedate age, and to battle against every influence seemingly hostile. Youth, with its mental astigmatisms, is certain to misjudge situations until it gains the corrective lenses of experience. It is bound to clothe with over-zealous colors all that touches its fate, and to defend itself heroically against encroachment.
Mauney was no exception.
He rose next morning in vast determination to assert the rights of his own personality, feeling that he had been spoon-fed long enough, that the hour had arrived when, not only should he think for himself, but throw out his formative impressions upon a moulding society.
No one will quarrel with him for this, since, even if his impressions were mistaken, a matter for opinion, naturally, his mood upon this spring morning, the twentieth of May, to be exact—was evidently the mood of progress. His pain was the pain of growth. It was the pain of birth. And birth is the moment of discontinuous growth.
“All my ideas are due for a great heart-searching, a great sifting, a great consolidation. From now no gloom can be injected into the atmosphere without my consent. Nothing is true because some one so states. Truth is what I personally feel, and I feel that, in spite of the disheartening narrowness of logic, in spite of the misanthropic outlook of fossilized intelligence, in spite of all that a university has raised up to alarm my mind, there does exist a cheerful future for my kind, and a great happiness that, far away as it may be, is not quite out of sight.”