By degrees as he sat there, his cigarette smoked out, but with no thought of moving or of Æschylus, the vague and fluid currents of his mind that for years had coursed through his consciousness, though he himself had scarcely been conscious of them, began for the first time to crystallize into something illuminating and definite. Like some supersaturated solution of chemical experiment, his mind, long crying out for and demanding beauty, needed but one more grain of desire to render its creed solid, and to himself now for the first time came the revelation of himself, and like a spectator at some enthralling drama, he watched himself, learning what he was, without comment either of applause or disgust, but merely fascinated by the fact of this new possession, his own individuality, and, even as Frank had said to Helen only yesterday, his own inalienable right to it. It was none other’s but his alone. There was nothing in the world the same as it, since every human being is a unique specimen, and, bad or good, it was his own clay, his own material, out of which his will, like some sculptor’s tool should fashion a figure of some kind. And everything he saw, the yellow iris, the blue butterfly, the water-weeds, were in their kind perfect. Their natural growth, unstunted by restraint or attempt to control them into something else, had brought them to that perfection; and was it conceivable in any thinkable scheme of things that man, the highest and infinitely most marvellous work of nature, should not be capable of rising, individual by individual, to some corresponding perfection? Soil, sun, environment were necessary; the flags would not grow in the desert, the lark would not soar nor carol in captivity, but given the freedom, the care, or the cultivation which each required, every living and growing thing had within itself the perfection possible to itself. Up to this point his thought had been as intangible as a rainbow, though like a rainbow of definite shape and luminous colour, and showed itself only in a brightened, unseeing eye, and in fingers that twitched and clutched till the nails were white with pressure round his flannelled knee. Then suddenly the crystallization came, ungrammatical, but convincing. “It is me,” he said aloud, as Magda had said it. In a moment the whole solution was solid.