"The world has grown very vast and very mysterious to me," she solemnly responded. "I've had even more wonderful things than that take place in my own home."
Mrs. Joyce saw that to go would be best, at least for the time, and together she and Leo went down the stairway and out into the street, leaving the stubborn youth to confront his problem alone with the phlegmatic Mrs. Post.
VII
THE RETURN OF THE SPIRIT
Youth is surrounded by mystery—nothing but magic touches him; but it is a beautiful, natural, hopeful magic. The mists of morning rise unaccountably, the rains of autumn fall without cause. The lightning, the snows, the grasses appear and vanish before the child's eyes like magical conjurations, until at last, for the most part, he accepts these miracles as commonplace because they happen regularly and often. In a world that is incomprehensible to the greatest philosopher, the lad of twenty comes and goes unmoved by the essential irresolvability of matter.
So it had been with Victor. Under instruction he had come to speak of electricity as a fluid, of steel as a metal, as though calling them by these names explained them. He discussed the ether, calmly considering it a sort of finely attenuated jelly, something which quivered to every blow and was capable of transmitting motion instantaneously. Sound, heat, and light were modes of motion, he had been told, and these words satisfied him. Food taken into the body produced power, and this power was transmitted from the stomach to the brain, and from the brain to the muscles, and so the limbs were moved. But just how the meat and potatoes got finally from the brain to the nerves and so into the swing of a baseball bat did not trouble him. Why should it?
Life and age were mere words. Death he had heard described by clergymen as something to be prepared for, a dark and dismal event reserved for old people, but which did occasionally catch a man in his arrogant youth, generally in the midst of his sins. Life meant having a good time, a succeeding in sport, business, or love. Of course certain philosophic phrases like "continuous adjustment of the organism to the environment" and "the change of the organism from the simple to the complex" had stuck in his mind. But any real thought as to what these changes actually meant had been put aside quite properly, for the pastimes and ambitions of the student to whom study is an incidental price for a joyous hour at play.
But now, here in this room, beside the motionless body of his mother, he began to think. He had a good mind. His father had left him a rich legacy in his splendid body, but also something mental—latent to this hour—which produced an irritating impatience with the vague and the mysterious. He resented the intrusion of an insoluble element into his thinking. He was repelled by the discovery that his mother was abnormal, and from the point of view of this "ghost-room" his life at the university was becoming sweeter, more precious, more normal every hour.
Then, too, his afternoon of reading at the library had put into his mind several new and all-powerful conceptions which had germinated there like the seeds which the Indian "adept" plants in pots of sand, rising, burgeoning, blossoming on the instant. He knew the names of some of those men whose words might be counted on the side of his mother's endowment, for they were famous in physical or moral science, but he had not known before that they admitted any real belief in the kind of things which his mother professed to perform.