"As a matter of fact, no youngster knows quite what he fancies," his father drawled. "I had a fancy for the law and politics. Two years of reading Blackstone and a term in the Legislature cured me of both. Take your Uncle Mark. He was past thirty before he found his real bent. Follow your natural bent, Rod, whatever it is. You have plenty of time and backing. This beginning on the ground floor may work out. Knowledge of any sort never comes amiss." So that was settled. When his father presently left the zoom Rod picked up and opened the folio. He read over forty or fifty closely-written sheets, knitting his smooth young brow over the phrasing. "Won't do---only in spots. It's dead. I've got to breathe the breath of life into these people. And I don't seem to know how." He sprang to his feet, paced the floor. "All I know is what somebody has told me, what I've read in books," he grumbled. "Cobwebby stuff. Pretty--lots of it--moving--but no substance. All I got out of school was a mass of unclassified facts. I'm crammed with 'em. I know what a lot of great men did--but not how they did it--why they did it. And language. What's the good of a 'steen-thousand-word vocabulary if you've got no peg to hang it on, only the old pegs other people have used till they're all worn and shiny? I'm like a man with a craving to paint beautiful things he can see, with a whole box of color-tubes, and no idea how to apply his colors to get the effects he wants. Or a finely made steam engine all ready to run, greased and oiled and water in the boilers, but no fuel to make steam. I don't know people, humanity, only one kind. I don't know life; only one comfortable groove of it. I don't know anything that really counts, except that I don't know much. I wouldn't be stuck with this, if I did." He faced about, frowning on the pile of written sheets. "I'd be able to make a thing go the way I wanted it, whether it was a story or a girl. I can't do either. I don't know how--and I've got to find out how. As long as I stay in a nice, fenced pasture I never will find out. It's all too cut and dried. Too many taboos. Too many fences. I've got to break through. I'm too much like the pea in the pod--I am green, the pod is green, all the world is green." He sat down in a chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and lost himself in concentrated thought.