Blessed is the girl who can console herself with the densities of morning stars. She preserved a normal curiosity about physical whys and wherefores, which are the best medicine in the world for too much self.
She wondered why the particles of a metal stick so close together. Lucretius had said it was because the atoms were hooked. It did rather look as if in some way they overlapped, but then it also looked as if the atoms themselves were compressed. She wondered what force could be so tremendous as to squeeze atoms into iron, nickel, ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, and osmium, each a little denser than the preceding.
And what made a metal like sodium unite with a gas like chlorine to make table-salt? She would always thrill to the taste of a little salt on a stalk of crisp celery, but she would thrill a good deal more if she knew what really happened when those atoms wedded.
Chapter 77. Iridium
For that matter, everything was wedded to something else. All the noble metals seemed to happen together. The osmium and iridium in the tip of her fountain pen were so much alike that they could be called by the name osmiridium. Perhaps all the world was like that, one stuff with different appearances. Had not her planet once been something very hot and uniform, which had cooled in many shapes?
One evening, as they sat before the glowing coals, she coaxed her father to talk about the one substance. He told her of Thales, who thought it water; of Anaximenes, who thought it air; of Heraclitus, who saw the earth as ever-changing fire; of the Stoics, who thought that God’s reason is a creative fire forming the earth and preserving it, a doctrine which Lucretius could not abide; of Plato, who conceived earth as made of little cubes and fire of little pyramids.
For Ambrose Rich all these substances were evidently only forms of thought. He was chary of expressing opinions, but his daughter fancied that nothing was real to him except thought. For him the splendidly broken living coals did not fade into atoms but into spirit.
In Jean’s mind they met no such fate. The indescribable glow, far too delicate and luminous to be called red, was to her the actual glow of atoms. She did not attribute the color to her mind. What she longed for was keener senses to see into the heart of things.
And if she was inclined to agree with Heraclitus, it is hardly necessary to ascribe her feeling to her wintry isolation or her longing for Marvin’s warm clasp. It is human nature to love the fire that burns in its own veins.
She often reflected that anything will burn. Nothing is so solid or so wet but it can fade away in heat. Some day the whole round earth would vanish as a round knot of birch vanishes up the chimney. She was not to be deceived by the cold look of ice or silica, for you never could tell what might happen.