“It’s no use!” James hopelessly declared one night. “They are too old. You can only get at the young shoot.”
“It can’t be too late, as long as they aspire,” Julie exclaimed, the tears springing to her eyes. “Think!—after plowing all day in the river bottoms, in mud up to their waists, they come here in the few hours their poor souls own. It means something, I say. It’s a poor, twisted fragment of the thing that wrested Mind out of the Universe!”
“I’ve only one life to live,” James declared, closing his books, “and no more, Miss Dreschell, have you!”
“If only we could see it through!” Julie sighed.
She looked at the stars, as she walked home. Big shining worlds rolling through space carrying the problem of Mind on into infinity. Such a far journey man had yet to make. Isabel had told her to go out and hold up the world. She was finding it glorious business.
Julie came out of the night with the star-light still in her eyes. There was something stirring about her rapt, young presence, as she ascended the stairs to the sala, that quickened the attention of a tall young man who was rather hesitatingly awaiting her.
The young man stood in full view, and her attention was immediately attracted to his dignity of height and his direct gaze. She liked his indomitable head, with its rigidly youthful contour and surmounted by its upright crest of hair that glittered under the hanging lamp like metal. She decided that what was so striking about him was his superlatively untarnished look.
He introduced himself as Lieutenant Calmiden. Julie understood then that he was the Post Quartermaster, who had been absent, in Solano, for supplies.
They talked about Nahal, and he told her how much he loathed it, and all other conceivable islands of the seas.
“I’ve been wondering what you could have been thinking about as you came up the stairs,” he said. “You came in scattering light about you.”