The second lecture was hardly over when he heard the screen door of the kitchen lightly open and shut. He rose and expressed his gratitude for what he had learned, and when Jean appeared in the door of the library, all glowing with exercise, he went forward and took her by the hand. “Do I need to tell you that this has been the happiest day of my life?” She glanced down shyly. “I’m glad you liked it.” Chapter 38. Strontium The happy youth rowed off to his own hired island and for a time sat watching the port lights coming up the river, red as a nitrate of the thirty-eighth element. Then he went to his tent and wrote a letter to his father. In case any lectures were to be offered in the Yale summer school he would like to suggest that two by Dr. Ambrose Rich on “State Help to Farmers” would prove acceptable. He wrote also to Kate Coggeshall, expressing the hope that if Dr. Rich came to New Haven, she would see her way clear to invite him to Wickford, to talk about Roman ladies. He begged her to use the enclosed hundred as a lecture fee. These letters written, he took his fill of deep and liquid sleep. He awoke with the thrushy dawn and lay listening. He summed up yesterday in a flash, and was sure he had made no mistake. It was a century of new life, and there was more to come. He should feel very sorry to miss any of it, and he’d better be up. He rubbed the delicious sleep out of his eyes. He arose in pyjamas and made his way toward the east. When he emerged on the long even rim next to the channel, what he saw was beryl beneath and magnesium garnet above, with the sun still hidden. A year ago that unrevealing glory hid some thirty million men busy at the day’s killing. Now it was full of new starts, like the tuning up of these birds. As he stood there he began at last to see why electricity shaped itself into hydrogen and so on up, till it attained to dawns, and thrushes, and Jean. It was art. It was the divine art of making vibrations audible or visible. Just now he was supremely content with his own level of perception, for any other would have meant different sights and sounds. Much as he loved her cheeks, he had no desire to hear the ruddy waves within them boom like surf on a limestone shore. Much as he loved a short ray, he would rather not be tuned up to three quintillion vibrations a second, at which rate he would see only her bones. Thus content with every common sight, he perceived one coming up the river. It was the patrol boat going to town. He ran down the rocks with his letters, seated himself on a thwart all covered with dew, rowed out, and was relieved of his burden. The row warmed him a little, and he determined to have a swim. He presently emerged from his tent as God made him, with soap and towel next to his godliness. He walked through the tickling woods and searched out a southern rock below which the beryl looked bluer, and plunged.