He evolved a theory, constructed around her, dim and nebulous, yet persistent; perforce nebulous, since he was dealing with a matter too fine, too subtle, too unexplored, to lend itself to the gross imperfect imprisonment of words. He never spoke of it, even to her, but staring at her sometimes with a reeling head he felt himself transported, by her medium, beyond the matter-of-fact veils that shroud the limit of human vision. He felt illuminated, on the verge of a new truth; as though by stretching out his hand he might touch something no hand of man had ever touched before, something of unimaginable consistency, neither matter nor the negation of matter; as though he might brush the wings of truth, handle the very substance of a thought.... He felt at these times like a man who passes through a genuine psychical experience. Yes, it was as definite as that; he had the glimpse of a possible revelation. He returned from his vision--call it what he would, vision would serve as well as any other word--he returned with that sense of benefit by which alone such an excursion--or was it incursion?--could be justified. He brought back a benefit. He had beheld, as in a distant prospect, a novel balance and proportion of certain values. That alone would have left him enriched for ever. Practical as he could be, theories and explorations were yet dear to him: he was an inquisitive adventurer of the mind no less than an active adventurer of the world. He sought eagerly for underlying truths. His apparently inactive moods were more accurately his fallow moods. His thought was as an ardent plough, turning and shifting the loam of his mind. Yet he would not allow his fancy to outrun his conviction; if fancy at any moment seemed to lead, he checked it until more lumbering conviction could catch up. They must travel ever abreast, whip and reins alike in his control. Youth--were the years of youth the intuitive years of perception? Were the most radiant moments the moments in which one stepped farthest from the ordered acceptance of the world? Moments of danger, moments of inspiration, moments of self-sacrifice, moments of perceiving beauty, moments of love, all the drunken moments! Eve moved, he knew, permanently upon that plane. She led an exalted, high-keyed inner life. The normal mood to her was the mood of a sensitive person caught at the highest pitch of sensibility. Was she unsuited to the world and to the necessities of the world because she belonged, not here, but to another sphere apprehended by man only in those rare, keen moments that Julian called the drunken moments? apprehended by poet or artist--the elect, the aristocracy, the true path-finders among the race of man!--in moments when sobriety left them and they passed beyond?