Looking up, he caught an expression in Lowndes’s eyes the meaning of which he suspected. “Oh, you needn’t be afraid,” he added, hastily, “that this is insanity. It’s only imagination. That’s the way I felt. And my work was only another long desert to be toiled through--with the Sphinx at the end. I wasn’t a successful preacher, and you know it. I hadn’t any grip on men. I hadn’t any grip on myself--or God. I couldn’t see any use or any meaning or any joy in it. The whole thing choked me. I wanted a simpler, more elemental life. I wanted to go up and down the earth and try new forms of living, new ways of doing things, new people. Life--that was what I wanted; to feel the pulse of the world throb under my touch, to be in the stir, to be doing something. I was always haunted by the conviction that life was tremendous if only you once got at it. I couldn’t get at it where I was. I was rotting away. So when that money was left me it came like a godsend. I knew my wife could live on that, and I didn’t think she’d miss me much, so I just came off.” “And you like it?” The man’s eyes flamed. “Like it? It’s great! It’s the only thing there is. I’ve been from Maine to California this year. I wintered in a Michigan lumber-camp--that was hell. I was a boat-hand on the Columbia last summer--that was heaven. I worked in a coal-mine two months--a scab workman, you understand. And now I’m at this. I tell you, it is fine to get rid of cudgelling your brains for ideas that aren’t there, and of pretending to teach people something you don’t know, and take to working with your hands nine hours a day and sleeping like a log all night. I hadn’t slept for months, you know. These people tell me about themselves. I’m seeing what life is like. I’m getting down to the foundations. I’ve learned more about humanity in the last six months than I ever knew in all my life. I believe I’ve learned more about religion. I’m getting hold of things. It’s like getting out on the open sea after that desert I was talking about--don’t you see? And it all tastes so good to me!” He dropped his head into his hands, exhausted by the flood of words he had poured rapidly out. Lowndes hesitated long before he spoke. He was reflecting that Witherle’s exaltation was pathological--he was drunk with the air of the open road. “Poor little devil!” he thought. “One might let alone a man who finds ecstasy in being a coal-heaver; but it won’t do.” “Life is big,” he admitted, slowly; “it’s tremendous, if you like; it’s all you say--but it isn’t for you. Don’t you see it is too late? We’re all of us under bonds to keep the world’s peace and finish the contracts we undertake. You’re out of bounds now. You have got to come back.”