Of course, much truth lay in this fresh construed idealism; much health was in this sublimation of his energies. No long process in human nature can omit any part of human nature. A pondered crime has, in its texture, whatever of good or truth the criminal conceal. A deed of service hides all the infirmities and selfishness of the noble man. So, this long grown flower in Quincy, blossoming now in a period of exultant confidence, had come not only from his need of harbor for himself and of translating a truth to fancy, but as well from his rich fund of spirit and his deep strain of nature. His dream as he nursed it, now, was in good sooth extravagant. But the wildest dream has its root in the truth; and the most mendacious is a mere branching out from a confession. Quincy, then, with his second year at college, revelled in a philosophy. Like all personal things at nineteen years, it was very concise and pointed, left to its own ways; and very vague when he endeavored to articulate it. Quincy of course could not admit this to himself. So when Garsted was dubious or unconvinced, he blamed Garsted’s obtuseness to spiritual things and withdrew farther from the realities. The authorship of Deering in most of his ideas was manifest. The Professor was welcome in this capacity. Quincy did not object to a descent from such. Of course, Julia had no conscious part. He was the steel; she at best was color. He knew her now as a splendid woman, as a fit mate for a great man. That he had ever doubted this fitness or this harmony or this completeness was as far from Quincy as the once real days when he had lain as a center-presence in his crib. Yet, all of these truths remained. He was, of course, like all of us, still a center-presence to himself; he was of course, like all of us, a doubter of the otherness in a thing desired. But for the moment these truths were latent. There had been real fire beneath the smoke that had blurred his past spring and summer. But Quincy was in a state where fire is denied and the smoke blown off by a new draught of energy that gains its intensity through a clear heat. All misgivings, then, about the Deerings went. And went as well, his misgivings about himself, his misgivings about life. “A new accomplishment of Quincy,” said Rhoda that Christmas; “he’s become conceited.” The creed of Professor Deering was unmistakable. Nor did Quincy mistake it. He mistook merely himself in believing he had adopted it, because a corner of his being--his intellect--had managed to nod “Yes” to it.