As Alvin Tor watched her, tendrils of peace gradually interfered with the blankness on his face. His lips sustained an unpremeditated repose. A sensitive compassion dropped the sparks of its coming into his eyes. His clothes became a jest upon an inhuman body; the earth of him effortlessly transcended itself in the gesture of his arm flung out to the woman. “Impalpable relic of a soul, the spirit you held must have severed its shadow to preserve you forever from the waves,” he said, his face blindfolded with ecstasy, “for you grasp the water with immortal relaxation. You are not a body--you are beauty receding into a resistless seclusion.” “Kind fool, musically stifling himself in a row-boat--made kind by the desperate tenderness of a lie--you are serenading the chopped bodies of your emotions,” said the woman. Alvin Tor’s face cracked apart and the incredulously hurrying ghost of a child nodded a moment and was snuffed out. “Mermaid of haunting despondency, what are you?” he asked. “I am the symbol of your emotions,” the woman answered. “I made them roses stepped upon by God,” said Alvin Tor. “I am the symbol of your emotions,” said the woman. Alvin Tor heavily dropped his raised arm, like a man smashing a trumpet. Restless white hands compressed the ruddy broadness of his face. The woman slid into the green swells like exhausted magic. Alvin Tor rowed back to the river. II A woman lifted the green window-shades in her room and resentfully blinked at the sun-plastered clamours of a street. She turned to the bed upon which another woman reclined. “Say, wasn’t that a nutty drunk we had last night?” she said. “Huggin’ a Bible and ravin’ about waves and mermaids and a lot of funny stuff!” She dropped the green shade and stood against it a moment in the smouldering gloom of the room. _Her brown hair had a drugged gentility: its short dark curls hugged her head with despondent understanding. Her face had been washed to an imperturbable transparency: it had the whiteness of reclining foam overcast with a twinge of green--the sea had lent her its skin._ SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY The concentrated vehemence of a mountain halted against the sky in a thin line of thwarted hostility. A waterfall hurdled its crazed parabola between gray rocks, flying into a stifled scream of motion far below. When the pine trees moved a mathematician solved his problems, and his acrid exultation hypnotized the air. The pungent truculence of earth that had never been stepped on raised its brown shades.