I lit a pipe. Melancholy and the hint of an old anguish wiped out Mrs. Mahon.--This anguish is what moves me, moves me toward what seems the cause of the anguish. A paradox that is a common law. Look at love: how pain of unfulfillment moves us upon the loved one, and as we come ever closer, ever deeper and more absolute grows the pain of unfulfillment. If I could analyze what this is that has taken me: if I could only know where it began.... But I know that it must first fill out its life ere my mind measure it. What did my poor analysis avail me? How wisely I announced: “Your anguish moves you toward the source of your anguish. You cannot stay still because you must fulfill your own beginning.” And how blindly I moved! I reached into my pocket and took out the envelope that I had not yet examined, and that Mrs. Mahon had helped me to forget. It was addressed _Philip LaMotte, Esquire_ _By Bearer_ and it was in the straight high script of Mildred Fayn! It was empty. I tapped it against my open palm and wondered why I felt that it had any bearing on the case. There was no proof that this was the alleged letter of the fatal messenger. On the contrary, how could I entertain a thought that would implicate Mildred in this horrible affair? What was I trying to find, or to think? I was abhorrent to myself. Doubtless, Mildred had written more than once to a man so close. My reason flayed my miserable thoughts: but did not break them: did not avail against their issuance in deed. I telephoned to Mildred. “Yes?” she answered and her frail voice bloomed out of the wire, drenching my sense in a languor of desired peace. “Mildred,” I said, “doubtless these days you would prefer not to see me.” She did not answer this. “But something possibly important has come up: I feel that I should speak to you.” She hesitated. “Meet me at lunch, at Sherry’s ... at one-thirty.” _i_ My work took me. I worked well. Doctor Isaac Stein’s warm voice startled me at my shoulder. “You have a fine power of concentration, Doctor Mark. I’ve been here five minutes watching your immobile absorption.” I turned and met the gray eyes of the great bio-chemist: of the man whom of all Americans I admired most. “It is the contrary of concentration. My brain is split in two. And the one part does not trouble the other.” He nodded and frowned. “It’s the part of your brain which dwells so voluptuously with those ganglions, that interests me.” “I stand rebuked, sir.” “You’ll learn that the other part which you think now so worthily engaged in speculation and in rhapsody, is merely the part not yet in solution--not at the point yet of true condensation. When you’re wholly crystallized, Mark, then you’ll be _whole_.” “You disapprove of me, Doctor Stein?” He laughed. “You should know better than that.” “You have the passion for unity of your race, sir.” I laughed back. “This faith in unity which your science posits is itself the creation of a wild mystic rhapsody.”