Reuben shook his head. "It's not like that, Ben. I mean, that is only one part of it, and for the rest--I can't explain it because I don't know enough, but of a sudden, after a long time of not knowing what I desired, there is this, and I do seem to be certain." "But for myself, I've not found it." "You will," said Reuben quickly. "It'll come to you, as it has--as I know it has to me." He reached for Ben's empty cup and poured a drink for himself, sitting cross-legged, intent, a small man with a boy's face. "Ben, I think--so far as I can explain it, I think it's a desire to know." "To know?" "About human creatures. How they're made, why they feel, think, suffer, act as they do. I wish...." His face tightened in distress, and Ben, with some insight, knew it was merely the distress of a search for communication among inadequate slippery words. "But medicine--that's healing the sick. That's going about----" "It's that, and that I accept, that I desire too, but it's more, Ben, it's study. Mr. Welland says a doctor must remain a student or die on his feet. And the study is not only sickness, remedies, surgery, the study is human beings--men, women, children, in all their ways--and _that_ I desire." He smiled suddenly, vulnerably, holding up his little finger. "There are creatures so tiny--Mr. Welland showed me a book, the _Micrographia_--so tiny there might be hundreds, nay thousands of them there on the space of my little fingernail. Too small to see without the lens, but living things, Ben--separate living beings, no fancy at all but the discovery of sober men--and he says, Mr. Welland says, why mayn't these animalculae have something to do with the mysteries of disease? They've been found everywhere--pond water, earth, the surface of the skin. Why mayn't they enter us sometimes, causing the ills we can't explain? It's a speculation, Mr. Welland says--he found it not in the books, only had the thought, and now and then (he said himself) from such thoughts come discoveries. I must--_know_," said Reuben. He jumped up and crossed the room swiftly to examine the books again. "One thing I know: you wasn't drunk when you bought these." "No, I didn't drink until supper at the tavern, and then later." "Later?" "Well, Mr. Shawn took me to a--place. A house, Ru--one of those." "Oh?..." Ben wondered why he had been moved to speak of it at all: there was no need. But even now, aware of something tight and painful in Reuben's silence, he felt and suppressed a continuing impulse to brag, to invent for Reuben a story of what never happened. "Was it--any good, Ben?" "I can't say it was. I think I'd had too much ale, and then something more there--buttered rum. That was my undoing." His laughter sounded to himself feeble and unwelcome. "You mean nothing happened?" "Nothing much.... No, damn it, nothing--I spilled at the gates. I think maybe I didn't really wish to go. Mr. Shawn----"