Doctor Crosson stood at his window and begged the placid sky for information. He looked through the lilacs and the locusts and all the green wilderness where beauty beat and throbbed like a heart in bliss. It was the Sabbath, and he was not sure. But he was sure of a melting tenderness in his heart for Irene Straley, and he felt that her power to feel sorry for her lover—sorry enough to defy all the laws in his behalf—was a wonderful power. He longed for her sympathy.
By and by he began to feel a pain, the pain of Drury Boldin. He was glad. He groaned. "I hurt! I hope that I may hurt terribly."
Suddenly it seemed that he actually was Drury Boldin in the throes of every fierce and spasmic thrill. Again he most vividly was Irene Straley watching her lover till she could not endure his torture or her own, and with one desperate challenge sent him back to the mystery whence he came.
Doctor Crosson, when he came back to himself, could not solve that mystery or any mystery. He knew one reality, that it hurts to be alive; that everybody is always hurting, and that human heart must help human heart as best it can. Pain is the one inescapable fact; the rest is theory.... He prayed with a deeper fervor than he had ever known:
"God give me pain, that I may understand, that I may understand!"
THE BEAUTY AND THE FOOL
There was once a beautiful woman, and she lived in a small town, though people said that she belonged rather in a great city, where her gifts would bring her glory, riches, and a brilliant marriage. In repose, she was superb; in motion, quite perfectly beautiful of form and carriage, with all the suave rhythms of a beautiful being.
Her beauty was her sole opulence; the boast of her friends; the confession of her enemies; the magnet of many lovers; the village's one statue. She had an ordinary heart, quite commonplace brains, but beauty that lined the pathway where she walked with eyes of admiration and delight.