Again, are not all of our ambitions, if not as to their purport at least as to their outcome, secret? Nature provides secrecy, or uncertainty, which is the same thing, or darkness as a condition for the development of quite everything, from seeds to human plans, and builds and builds with us in countless ways and to astonishing results, and yet we are not permitted to share Her secret. Our petty brains and bodies are but mere implements of sorts in Her hands whereby She is constructing something, the significance or purpose of which we cannot even guess and which She is at no pains to reveal. She builds us to contain, or rather to comprehend, but a modicum, a minute fragment, of the enormous information or secret which is Hers. Secrecy on Her part, you see. If one turns to the pages of science, what a masterly array of natural diplomacy and artifice is there displayed! The fishes of the sea imitating the coloring of the grasses or shadows of the deep in which they hide and by means of which they escape their enemies (protective coloring is the scientific name); insects the same, in so far as foliage and grasses are concerned; birds the same; reptiles the same; man, for all his noble theories and dreams of a generous and unselfish mode of conduct, the same; as artificial and secretive as any, he. The stripling lawyer imitates the look and manner of his intellectual superior--words, phrases, carriage, side-whiskers even--in order to seem his equal, or in other words to conceal (secrecy, you see) the fact that he is not his equal, from some trusting and unsophisticated client. Protective coloring, as it were. Take again the instance of a man beginning to rise financially and wishing to appear the equivalent of men far richer than himself. His office is in their vicinity, his residence in their neighborhood. He is in their club if possible, their church, their directories. He is not as rich as they are, but wishes to conceal the fact. It is not good for the world to know that he is not what he is not. His few public deeds would not be as acceptable or he would be compelled to doff the uniform he so much desires to wear, the manners, along possibly with the emoluments thereof, or the hope of them. Secrecy--secrecy--secrecy. A seeming only, where reality would leave life bare and hard.