He turned to his bookcases. But he needed something of more compelling interest than the census and immigration reports to fill the time till sleep would come. Most of his little library were reference books, the rest he had read and reread. On the bottom shelf was a bundle he had never unwrapped. They were books Walter had given him after one of their discussions over the meaning of Life. He had never read them, because he was sure he would find no interest in the hodge-podge, haphazard kind of thinking which Walter seemed to enjoy. He pulled them out now--at least they would offer the interest of novelty. The first book he opened was Henri Bergson's _L'Evolution Créatrice_. Walter, as was his custom, had annotated it copiously. On the fly-page he had written, "A superb discussion of the limitations of Pure Reason." The phrase caught Isadore's eye as he listlessly read the note. Was not this "limitation" of reason the very thing that was troubling him? No book that he had read in years seemed to vibrate so compellingly with a sense of actuality. This was partly due no doubt to the master craftsmanship of the author. But very likely it would have made no impression on Isadore if he had read it when Walter had asked him to. The jar and conflict of the last few months had opened up the compartments of his brain to a long-lost receptivity. The facts of life had shaken his intellectual structure until he was prepared to understand. This suave and erudite Frenchman was calmly announcing that the Age of Reason was a myth, rationalism a superstition. From every field of human knowledge Bergson was gathering his evidence, from the microscopic data of biology to the gigantic stellar facts beyond our vision, with merciless logic he was proving that the instrument with which we reason is not divine. "The God which has failed you," he said to Isadore, "is a false god. The brain, with which you created it, is only a faulty animal instrument, as liable to error as your eyes, for which you have been compelled to buy rectifying glasses." While the message of Bergson is iconoclastic, a titanic warfare against the formal gods, it is by no means destructive. It holds a more magnificent, a more humanly satisfying optimism than metaphysics has dared, a promise of greater intimacy with the living truth than cold reason ever formulated. Above all it offered to Isadore to restore his self-respect. He had to refill his lamp before he finished the book. And when he had reached the end, he could not sleep. A strange bodily unrest seized him. He wanted to get away. When the heavens opened and a great light shone upon Saul of Tarsus, he felt at once the need of going out to some distant desert place to rearrange his life in accordance with the new light. Isadore also had need of an Arabia.