The bright afternoon, with its myriads of shrilly clear and hissing sounds, was like a troubled falsetto rapture and he weakly fought to bring it nearer to his senses. As he sat beneath the tree he resolved to give his mind some labor with which it could transform the vision to a more solid picture, and he thought of the people who would soon be embarrassing him with their mouths and eyes. They were Jews of a kind that had rapidly spread over the south. The older people among them had migrated to the south some forty years previously and had gradually won large or comfortable fortunes by means of their thriftiness and trading abilities. They were now contented grand-and great-grand-parents, surrounded by two generations of their offspring, and all of them were strangely indifferent to the austere mysticism for which the Jewish race is so verbosely noted. Dreamless, voluble, self-assured, they angled with their religion in a half-hearted way and blackmailed, with money, the occasional flutters of mental curiosity. They had picked up several mannerisms of the south--softly drawling voices and unhurried movements--and the only things that distinguished them as Jews were the curved gusto of their faces and the fact that they mingled only with each other--a last, lukewarm trace of loyalty left by the surge of centuries of past incidents. Carl went into the house and returned, with paper and pencil, to his station beneath the persimmon tree. He strove to write a poem to the woman whom he had lost. It was a torture that, like a starved monster, devoured the softer spaces within his heart. It was as though he were endeavoring to compress the ruins of an entire world, making them narrower and narrower, more and more alive, until at last they formed the body of a woman. The effort brought him an actual physical pain; drops of sweat were born on his forehead, and his spirit reeled like a mesmerized, beaten drunkard. “All of life is a lie unless I make her appear on this paper,” he cried aloud to the persimmon-tree leaves, for the lack of better gods. He detested his own futility and sought to avenge himself upon it. When the poem was finished he fell into a troubled, plundered sleep in which his consciousness busily made reports that were unheeded. He could still see the trees and flowers, but they were like the edge of the universe miraculously brought near to his eyes. Finally, with an effort like a straight line thrusting aside several worlds, he roused himself and read the poem. It failed to satisfy him; it was a tangle of treacherous promises and pleading fragments--the line of one of her arms, with an ashen delicateness; the nervously boyish rebuke of her eyes; the tenuous defiance of her heart; the curled merriments of her hair--fragments fastened to a slip of white paper and lacking the great surge of breath that could have whirled them into a speaking whole. He had written other poems to her