Swinging and swaying and gliding, the great white Sound liner came up on the morning and swept her flag-flapped way down the shining river. Her glad whistle released her buoyant joy to the city, and the little tugs and the ferries answered with their barks and their toots. Up she came, triple-decked, her screw swirling in the green salt water, her smoke curling lustrous in the low-hung sun. She passed Blackwells Island, she swung easily beneath the great span of the Fifty-ninth Street bridge, and gave "good-morning" to the lower city. On a side-deck, leaning over the rail, stood a man and a woman. The man was strong, tan-faced, his eyes bright with fresh power. The woman was rosy-cheeked and exquisite in her new beauty. For the miracle of Spring which changed the earth had changed Myra and Joe. They too had put forth power and life, blossom and new green leaves. They had gone to the earth to be remade; they had given themselves over to the great physician, Nature; they had surrendered to the soil and the sun and the air. Earth had absorbed them, infolded them, and breathed anew in their spirits her warmth, her joy, her powerful peace. They had run bare-headed in the sun; they had climbed, panting, the jutting mountainside; they had taken the winds of the world on the topmost peak; they had romped in the woods and played in the meadow. And then, too, they had fed well, and rested much, and been content with the generous world. And in that health and peace of nature at last to Joe had come the great awakening of his life. The mental stock-taking he had begun on the day when Lissner had spoken to him, reached there its climax; the confusion cleared; the chaos took wonderful new shape. And he was amazed to see how he had changed and grown. He looked back on the man who had gone down to West Tenth Street as on a callow and ignorant youth, enthusiastic, but crude and untried. Back through those past months he went with the search-light of introspection, and then at last he knew. He had gone down to Greenwich Village crammed with theories; he had set to work as if he were a sheltered scientist in a quiet laboratory, where an experiment could be carried through, and there suddenly he had been confronted with Facts! Facts! those queer unbudgable things! Facts in a fierce stampede that engulfed and swept him along and put all his dreams to a galloping test, a test wherein he had even forgotten his dreams. He had gone the way of all reformers, first the explosive arousal, then the theory, then the test. He went over the Greenwich Village experience with Myra: