In long days upon the deck of his yacht Peter had come to distinguish between the physical unrest of his late years--vague and impersonal, afflicting him like hunger or the summer heat--and the perfect passion of his need for Miranda. Gradually, too, in these long weeks upon the sea Peter began to see steadily things which hitherto had wavered. He had touched reality at last. He overleaped the categories in a burning sense that life was very vast and very near; that the virtue of men could not easily be measured and ranked; that the wonder of existence began when it ceased consciously to confront itself, to probe its deep heart, and absurdly to appoint itself a law. He went through his adventures of the last few years with a smile for his ready infatuation with small aspects of men and things. He had attempted to inspect the discipline of the world, calling mankind to attention as though it were a regiment. He had been a Socialist, and then very nearly a Tory. Now, between sky and water, he vainly tried to constrain things to a formula. He found that he no longer desired to do so. He began to understand his mother's deep, instinctive acceptance of time and fate. All now seemed unreal, except the quiet, happy, and assured act of life itself. Craning at the Southern stars, he no longer desired to measure or to track their passage. He felt them rather as kindred points of energy. The pedantry and pride of knowledge, the ambition to assess, the need to round off heaven, to group mankind in a definite posture and take for himself a firmly intelligible attitude in his own time and way--these things had suddenly left him. Life was now emotionally simple, and it therefore had ceased to be intellectually difficult. He had found humour and peace--an absolute content to receive the passing day. Life itself mattered so much to him--so brimmed him with the passion of _being_--that all he had thought or read was now rebuked as an insolent effort to contain the illimitable. Interminably, of course, he thought of his personal quest. It all seemed very simple now. He had had some unhappy and trivial adventures. Their sole importance was to make him measure truly the high place of love. In the beginning was blind desire. Then the soul, with eyes for beauty and the power to elect, turned an instinct of the herd to a passion of the individual will--a passion whose fruit was loyalty and sacrifice, the treasures of art and the face of nature wrought into a countenance friendly and beautiful. So mighty had this passion grown that now it could command, as an instrument, the need out of which it came. Love was now the measure of a man. Either it put him among creatures, groping uneasily till driven by appetite or fear, or it lifted him among the inheritors of passion, a gift rare as genius, a sanctuary from the driven flesh.