Eugenio himself, on his lower level, had something of the same experience. When he first began those inventions in prose which long seemed to him worthy of the best that his kindest friends said of them, he had great trouble in contriving facts sufficiently wonderful for the characters who were to deal with them, and characters high and noble enough to deal with the great and exalted facts. On one hand or the other his scheme was always giving out. The mirage of fancy which painted itself so alluringly before him faded on his advance and left him planted heavy-footed in the desert sands. In other words, he was always getting out of a subject. In the intervals between his last fiction and his next, when his friends supposed he was purposely letting his mind lie fallow (and perhaps willingly acquiesced in the rest they were sharing with him), he was really in an anguish of inquiry for something on which to employ his powers; he was in a state of excruciating activity of which the incessant agitation of the atoms in the physical world is but a faint image; his repose was the mask of violent vibrations, of volcanic emotions, which required months to clear themselves in the realization of some ideal altogether disproportioned to the expenditure of energy which had been tacitly taking place. At these periods it seemed to him that his lot had been cast in a world where he was himself about the only interesting fact, and from which every attractive subject had been removed before he came into it. He could never tell just how or when all this changed, and a little ray, very faint and thin at first, stole in upon his darkness and broadened to an effulgence which showed his narrow circle a boundless universe thronged with the most available passions, interests, motives, situations, catastrophes and denouements, and characters eagerly fitting themselves with the most appropriate circumstances. As nearly as he could make out, his liberation to this delightful cosmos took place through his gradual perception that human nature was of a vast equality in the important things, and had its difference only in trifles. He had but to take other men in the same liberal spirit that he took himself to find them all heroes; he had but to take women at their own estimate to find them all heroines, if not divinely beautiful, then interesting, fascinating, irresistibly better than beautiful. The situation was something like this; it will not do to give away his whole secret; but the reader needs only a hint in order to understand how in his new mind Eugenio was overwhelmed with subjects.