Paula took the surface car home, because the day was so rare and the
crowd was still downward bent. The morning paper contained an
announcement of Quentin Charter's new book, and a sketch of the author.
A strange, talented figure, new in letters, the article said. The
paragraphs had that fresh glow of a publisher's perennial high hope.
Here was the book of a man who had lived; who drew not only upon art,
history, and philosophy for his prisms of thought, but who had roamed
and worked and ridden with men, keeping a sensitive finger ever at the
pulse of nature; a man who had never in the most insignificant degree
lowered the import or artificially raised the tension of his work to
adjust it to the fancied needs of the public. In spite of the
enthusiastic phrasing, everything about Charter fascinated her; even the
make-up of the unread book in her hand, and the sentences that gleamed
from the quickly turned pages.
She had ridden many squares, when the name of Dr. Bellingham stood out
before her eyes in the newspaper. The chill in her arteries was
perceptible as before, when Reifferscheid spoke the name. It was as the
latter had said--the famous healer and telepathist was to start a series
of classes for women.
Paula lived alone in a small apartment at the _Zoroaster_, "Top-side o'
Park." Few friends, many books, within a car ride of the world's best
fruition in plays, lectures, music, and painting--yet the reality of it
all was the expansion of her mind in the days and nights alone. The
subtle relations of things encroached upon her intelligence with a
steady and certain trend. She never had to pass, like so many of cruder
nature, through the horrid trials of materialism; nor to be painfully
bruised in mind from buffeting between manhandled creeds and the pure
ethics of the Lord Christ. Hers was not an aggressive masculine
originality, but the complement of it--that inspiring, completing
feminine intelligence, elastic to a man's hard-won concepts and ready
with a crown for them.
Something of this type of woman, the big-brained brothers of men have
written and chiselled, painted, sung and dreamed of, since human thought
first lifted above the appetites. There must be a bright answer for each
man's particular station of evolution in the world's dumfounding snarl
of the sexes--one woman to lighten his travail and accelerate his
passage to the Uplands. For we are but half-men, man and woman alike.
The whole is two, whose union forms One.... This is the key to Nature's
arcanum; this, the one articulate sentence from all the restless
murmuring out of the past; this, the stupendous Purpose weaving the
million thrilling and truant activities of the present hour--the clean
desire for completion--the union of two which forms One.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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