“Very well,” he said, “first of all—close your book.” The boy complied. “Now listen. We are going to reverse the order of examination. I shall tell you your symptoms. And you shall tell me what they mean.”
They were quite ordinary things, Garsted had found in Quincy. But they flattered him. That his eyes were given over to sudden reveries, that he spoke strangely cynical doubts about humanity, that he seemed only partially present in discussions which formerly he had entered with a whole spirit—these qualities, seen in him by a friend, resolved themselves to Quincy into an aura of mystic and romantic import. He was very happy to be so enigmatic. He began to feel that his was a beautiful dilemma. These were of course the days before that dilemma really gripped him. So he beamed on Garsted who had just accused him of being emotional in his statements and shoddy in his observations—as if he had been flattered.
“I am sure, Simon,” he said, “I can’t help you. Since you’ve done the symptoms, you’ll have to do the diagnosis also.”
“Well!” Garsted stretched, yawned and jumped up, “I guess perhaps it is nothing after all but the spring fever a month too early. Good-bye.”
And Quincy despised him for being so easily satisfied, so lightly affected at the end, in this outward mystery of his soul. Had he known Garsted would drop his inquiry so soon, he would have made his reticence more savory with a few gleams of the great truth.
Here then, he was—alone with himself, and the rustiness of his armor beginning to scratch and shriek.
He had a month of this. And when, at the end of it, a note from Julia marked still another phase, matters were at least more clearly before him, even if he had not resolved them. It was a step to have reconnoitred his position,—however far he was from having fathomed it.
Plainly, his ideals and aspirations lined out before him, with the Professor as their captain and their priest. And as flatly on the other side, stood Julia with her deep heart and her still soul and her cherished charm, reaching within him also. Within these antipodes was all of him, needing, in order to embrace them all, to reconcile them and make them one. Did they really destroy each other? Did they deny each other? Did they drive home the wrongness to some part of him who craved them all? Why did the whole of him seem shaken, if any part of his possession in these two threatened to disappear? What lay beneath his grim resolve to save them both, prove them both right, prove them both one—these antipodes? If the meat of his convictions lay really in him, why this desperate need of saving them? Were they merely a treasure he loved, or a prop of all his structure? And if a prop, why should they not be steadfast, unified, as a prop must be? Why was recognizing one needfully a blow to the other? Why could he not take his treasures blindly, like the rest of the world, and forget about them?
Pathetic little gained him his unceasing questions. There in his soul, the insidious, beautiful woman and the man who embodied the one program of happiness he had ever known, seemed grimacing and threatening. In the man, he had learned a technique of happiness; in the woman found a field for exercising his new, life-giving powers. By all the laws of justice, these two should smile upon each other, be supplements in an eternal concord. Yet here they were, plotting mutual destruction! And in his need of saving them both, Quincy was fighting for the one strain of happiness he had ever had. Without the way, what was the means? Without the means, how empty was the way! And more. How could he place his faith in the one, if by so doing, it destroyed the necessary other?
Quincy sensed his quandary. He must be faithful endlessly to him, in order to have faith in her. Yet, in receiving her with what she gave him, where went the faith in him? It was as if the moon, which has her light from the sun, should say: