The giants of old, the frontiers and clipper ships of old, are gone. They went out with the ebb tide, and here already comes back the flood! And with it the same old human chance, the magical chance of escape. Lay aside the rifle and you pick up the camera--to creep with it into the lion’s den; or to climb with it into the top of a towering oak, on some sheer mountain wall; and, pushing it before you along a horizontal limb, feet dangling in space, a stiff wind blowing, eagles screaming overhead, canyon wall below you, and far, far down the narrow canyon bottom, you hold on, body balancing camera, but nothing over against the swaying brain, and grind out a hundred feet of movie film. This is to shoot a good many lions. Life offers us all the chance of escape. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us; but beneath the surface we need go no deeper than our own hearts to find a frontier, and that adventurous something for which the decorous and conventional allows no place in its scheme. CHAPTER II THE RADIUM OF ROMANCE CHAPTER II THE RADIUM OF ROMANCE “Why thus longing, thus forever sighing?” Because, I suppose, there were once two sides to her bread-board, both of which she used for sketching. She brought the board from the Fine Arts room at college to her new home, carrying it one day to the kitchen to try her hand at modeling--in dough. There are several of her early sketches about the house, of that period prior to the dough, which show real talent. Her bread, however, had about it the touch of genius. The loaves grew larger all the time, the bakings more frequent. The walls of any house are rather quickly covered with pictures, but there is no bottom to the bread-box. There are still two sides to her bread-board, and she uses both sides for dough. “Why thus longing, thus forever sighing? For the far-off, unattained and dim?” Because, I suppose, time was when I thought of other things than the price of flour; not because of much money in those times, but because she made angel-cake most of the time then, and what bread we did eat was had of the baker; and because the price of flour was then a matter of course. The price of flour now is a good deal more than a matter of course, and the price of corn-meal even more than the price of flour; so that we must count the slices now, and cut them thin. We shall have angel-cake again, I promise the children, with the biggest kind of a hole in the middle, giving them a bran muffin to munch meanwhile, and wondering in my heart if this fight for bread will ever end in angel-cake. One can live on potatoes and bran muffins, although there was never any romance about them, not even during the Great War when Wall Street took them as collateral. We need cake. I don’t remember that I ever lacked potatoes as a child, but, as a child, I do remember dancing while the pickaninnies sang,