Mysticism and psychology, which he had dabbled in at first half-contemptuously, had become serious studies to him. Dimly he felt the fascination of that unending effort which from the days of the Chaldeans had swayed the lives of a long succession of the world's masters, the effort to establish some sort of communication, however faint, however speculative, between the world of known things and the world beyond. At times he found himself moved to the most profound self-ridicule. He would ask himself how it was possible for a man of science seriously to investigate problems whose very foundation must be an assumption. He looked at his walls lined with books, and he smiled grimly as he realized how little, after all, they had taught him. The sum of all that he had learned from them amounted to nothing. Yet he remembered what Spencer Trowse, a fellow student, had said to him. A sudden flush had lightened his thin cheeks, pallid with the ceaseless energy of their student life.
"After all, Powers, I think that we are wasting our days," he exclaimed. "Those ancients saw no farther behind the veil than we. I am tired of all this musty lore, this delving among cobwebs."
"What then?" Powers had asked. "Modern scholarship has taught us little enough."
"Let us have done with all scholarship," Trowse answered. "It is the laws of humanity we want to understand. Let us study them at first hand. Let us go down among the people."
"What can this rabble teach us?" Powers had asked himself, full of the intellectual contempt of the young student for the whole pleasure-loving world. "Whether their wings be soiled or pure, they are only butterflies!"
Trowse smiled grimly.
"They are the living evidences," he said, "of laws which are worth studying. If we would understand humanity we must not start by despising any part of it."
With characteristic impetuosity the two young men had thrown themselves heart and soul into their new enterprise. They haunted police courts and places of entertainment. They lived for a while in a great industrial center; they listened to the hoarse, tragic undernote of the millions underneath. They made their bow at the reception of a duchess, and spent a whole Bank Holiday dancing upon Hampstead Heath. These and many other phases of life they had encountered with an amusement, in Powers' case partly genuine, in Trowse's wholly tolerant. For all the time they kept strenuously in view their real end. They wanted to understand the causes of all that they saw; they wanted to discover laws.
The end of their enterprise came suddenly. A disaster in his family left Trowse unexpectedly poor. It was necessary for him to take at once some wage-earning position. The two young men parted, curiously enough, without regret. Powers, though no sentimentalist, possessed his due share of the affections, had an innate love for the beautiful, and a longing for a catholic and universal understanding of his fellows. Where Trowse would gaze with unmoved face, and pursue his calm calculations, Powers could only peer with barely veiled horror. They held together through those three years of unorthodox study, but toward the end of it they had drawn wide apart. Trowse entered the ranks of his profession a man of steel, without nerves or sentiment or pity. Powers, with his fuller understanding of life, had no longer any desire for a regular career. Possessed of ample means, the necessity for it had never existed. He left England almost at once, and entered upon a somewhat restless but comprehensive scheme of travel.
At last, shortly after his return home, one afternoon fate cast into his way on the Edgware Road the very subject that he sought. It was in the fringe of a city fog; the sky was heavy with clouds, the pavements were sloppy with recent rains; the broad thoroughfare was almost deserted when there glided by him the figure of a woman who held herself with a distinction oddly at variance with her shabby clothes. There was in her eyes the look of one in extremity—of a woman who had none of the ordinary fear of death and who would dare great things to pass from the evil place in which fate had set her to even a momentary draft from the cup of life.