I believe in sunshine and in hothouses. I believe in burning glasses. I believe in focusing light into heat and heat into white fire, and turning white fire into little flowing brooks of steel. And I believe in focusing men upon men. I believe in Conversion. Of course it would all be different--focusing men upon men, if men were cogs and wheels, or if the men they were focused on were made of stones. I stand and look at this stone and believe it is all rubber and whalebone inside. But what of it? It does not get true. While I am looking at a man and believing a certain thing about the man, it gets true. What is going on in my mind while I look at him effects actual mechanical changes in him, affects the flow of blood in his veins. A look colours him, whitens him, twists and turns the muscles and tissues in his body. I draw lines upon his inmost being. I lay down a new face upon his face. A moment after I look upon the man's face it has become, as it were, or may have become, a new little landscape. I have seen a great country opened up in him of what he might be like. While I look I have been ushered softly, for a second, into the presence of a man who was not there before. Such things have happened. Beatrice looked at Dante once. Ten silent centuries began singing. A man named Stephen, one day, while he was dying, gave a look at a man named Paul. Paul came away quietly and hewed out history for two thousand years. CHAPTER XVI EXCEPTION A bicycle, the other day, a little outside Paris as it was running along quietly, lifted itself off the ground suddenly, and flew three yards and seven inches. There are nine million seven hundred and eighty nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that have not flown three yards and seven inches. But what of it? Why count them up? Why bother about them? The important, conclusive, massive, irresistible, crushing, material fact is that one bicycle has flown three yards seven inches. The nine million seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that can not fly yet are negligible. So are nine out of ten business firms.