"Yes, I; why not? I can't help myself; I am a child of my time. Only, I felt the burden of life as humanity lives it, not touched by locality as you felt it." "But you have n't really lived that life yet, Jamie." "Yes, I have, Marcia." "How?" "I wonder now if _you_ will understand? I get it--I get all that through the imagination." "But imagination is n't reality." "More real than reality itself sometimes. Look here, I 'm not a philanthropic cad and I don't mean to say too much, but I can say this: when a thinking man before he is twenty-five has run up hard against the only solid fact in this world--death, he somehow gets a grip on life and its meaning that others don't." I waited for more. This was the Jamie of whom the depth of simplicity in "André's Odyssey" had given me a glimpse. He straightened himself suddenly. "I want to say right here and now that if I have felt, and feel--as I can't help feeling, being the child of my time and subject to its tendencies--the burden of this life of ours as lived by all humankind, thank God, I can even when bowed in spirit, feel at times the 'rhythm of the universe' that adjusts, coordinates all--" He broke off abruptly, laughing at himself. "I 'm getting beyond my depth, Marcia?" I shook my head. He smiled. "Well, then, I 'll get down to bed rock and say something more: you won't mind my mooning about and going off by myself and acting, sometimes, as if I had patented an aeroplane and could sustain myself for a few hours above the heads of all humanity--" I laughed outright. "What do you mean, Jamie?" "I mean that as I can't dig a trench, or cut wood, or run a motor bus, or be a member of a life-saving crew like other men, I 'm going to try to help a man up, and earn my living if I can, by writing out what I get in part through experience and mostly through imagination. There! Now I 've told you all there is to tell, except that I 've had something actually accepted by a London publisher; and if you 'll put up with my crotchets I 'll give you a presentation copy." "Oh, Jamie!" I was so glad for him that for the moment I found nothing more to say. "'Oh, Jamie,'" he mimicked; then with a burst of laughter he threw himself full length on the sofa. "What are you laughing at?" I demanded sternly. "At what Ewart and the Doctor would say if they could hear us talking like this so soon as their backs were turned on the manor. I believe the Doctor's last word to you was 'griddlecakes', and Ewart's to me: 'We 'll have dinner at twelve--I 'm going into the woods with Cale'. Well, I 'm in for good two hours of reading," he said, settling himself comfortably in the sofa corner. I had come to learn that this was my dismissal.