Now he could think more thoughts, have more fancies, while he took three or four steps across a room toward his daughter, than he had sometimes dared do in a whole year of his former life. There was a picture of himself in his fancy now that he liked. In the fanciful picture he had climbed up to a high place above the sea and had taken off his clothes. Then he had run to the end of a cliff and had leaped off into space. His body, his own white body, the same body in which he had been living all through these dead years, was now making a long graceful arched curve against a blue sky. That was rather nice too. It made a picture for the mind to take hold of and it was pleasant to think of one’s body as making sharp striking pictures. He had plunged far down into the sea of lives, into the clear warm still sea of Natalie’s life, into the heavy salt dead sea of his wife’s life, into the swiftly running young river of life that was in his daughter Jane. “I’m a great little mixer-up of figures of speech, but at the same time I’m a great little swimmer in seas,” he said aloud to his daughter. Well, he had better be a little careful too. Her eyes were becoming puzzled again. It would take a long time for one, living with another, to become used to the sight of things jerked suddenly up out of the wells of thought within oneself and he and his daughter would perhaps never live together again. He looked at the little stone held so firmly between his thumb and finger. It would be better to keep his mind fastened upon that now. It was a small, a minute thing, but one could fancy it looming large on the surface of a calm sea. His daughter’s life was a river running down to the sea of life. She would want something to which she could cling when she had been cast out into the sea. What an absurd notion. A little green stone would not float in the sea. It would sink. He smiled knowingly. There was the little stone held before him, in his extended hand. He had picked it up on a railroad track one day and had indulged in fancies concerning it and the fancies had healed him. By indulging in fancies concerning inanimate objects, one in a strange way glorified them. For example a man might go to live in a room. There was a picture in a frame on a wall, the walls of a room, an old desk, two candles under a Virgin, and a man’s fancy made the place a sacred place. All the art of life perhaps consisted in just letting the fancy wash over and color the facts of life. The light from the two candles under the Virgin fell on the stone he held before him. It was about the size and shape of a small bean and was dark green in color. In certain lights its color changed swiftly. There was a flash of yellow green as of new grown things just coming out of the ground and then that faded away and the stone became altogether a dark lusty green, as of the leaves of oak trees in the late summer, one could fancy.