When one tried to think his way along a too difficult road one was likely, at any moment, to get lost. One went up some dark lonely road and then, becoming frightened, one became at the same time shrill and distracted. There were things to be done, but one could do nothing. For example, and at the most vital moment in life, one might spoil everything by beginning to sing a silly song. Others would throw up their hands. “He’s crazy,” they would say, as though such a saying ever meant anything at all. Well, once before, he had been, as he was now, at just this moment. Too much thinking had upset him. The door of Natalie’s house had been opened and he had been afraid to enter. He had planned to run away from her, go to the city and get drunk and write her a letter telling her to go away to where he would not have to see her again. He had thought he preferred to walk in loneliness and darkness, to take the road of evasion to the throne-room of the god Death. And at the moment all this was going on his eye had caught the glint of a little green stone lying among all the gray meaningless stones in the gravel bed of a railroad track. That was in the late afternoon and the sun’s rays had been caught and reflected by the little stone. He had picked it up and the simple act of doing so had broken a kind of absurd determination within him. His fancy, unable at the moment to play over the facts of his life, had played over the stone. A man’s fancy, the creative thing within him, was in reality intended to be a healing thing, a supplementary and healing influence to the working of the mind. Men sometimes did a thing they called, “going it blind,” and at such moments did the least blind acts of their whole lives. The truth was that the mind working alone was but a one-sided, maimed thing. “Hito, tito, there’s no use my trying to become a philosopher.” John Webster was stepping toward his daughter who was waiting for him to say or do something that had not yet been done. Now he was quite all right again. Some minute re-adjustment had taken place inside himself as it had on so many other occasions within the last few weeks. Something like a gay mood had come over him. “In one evening I have managed to plunge pretty deeply down into the sea of life,” he thought. He became a little vain. There he was, a man of the middle class, who had lived all his life in a Wisconsin industrial town. But a few weeks before he had been but a colorless fellow in an almost altogether colorless world. For years he had been going along, just so, day after day, week after week, year after year, going along streets, passing people in the streets, picking his feet up and setting them down, thump thump, eating food, sleeping, borrowing money at banks, dictating letters in offices, going along, thump thump, not daring to think or feel much of anything at all.