"As for example the seeming humility of proper Christians?" "Oh, that, yes--but don't trouble thyself too much about that. It would seem they need it. Well, and there are those madder ones devoured by jealousy, spite, greed, and fears of a hundred kinds, mostly groundless. It's no-way true that all is vanity, but I think you may say that vanity is the source of nearly all the saddest things in human nature. Nay, I think our poor wench with the fits, by comparison with many respectable souls, is quite sane." "And so what is madness?" "Do thou tell me, thou who gavest me once a definition of health that serves me still." "A--a gross exaggeration of some natural activity of the mind? 'Lilies that fester....'" "I'm pleased I made thee discover the Sonnets. Yes, that might serve.... But the hunger for verifiable knowledge--now there's an activity of the mind, natural I think, but sluggish or nonexistent in most men, and in a few like thee and me, very intense: are we then mad?" "If such hunger for knowledge became painful or annoying to others, Amadeus, I am sure we would be called mad." "Mm-yas--thought I'd caught thee, but (as usual) I'm caught instead. So consider--would you say there are _any_ activities of the mind that would not deserve the name of madness if sorely exaggerated?" "Maybe none. That hunger for knowledge could become a thing _I'd_ call madness, if the pursuit of it caused a man to neglect too many other matters--such as sunlight and peeper frogs and Charity's pictures and the brightness of a swallow flying." "I'll agree. I dare say anything out of proportion may become a madness. Even generosity. Even love." "But Amadeus, I do ever think that love is not a thing, but more like a region where we travel. Something of that I said once to Ben. I can't remember when it was, and he may not have understood it--I'm sure I said it badly. Like a region, where we travel with--oh, some vision, some of the time. As sleep is like a region, and waking. Do I still say it badly, Amadeus? I mean that no one can give his friend a handful of sunlight, but may walk in it with him, and so love him." * * * * * After scant and haunted sleep, Ben woke to stillness where motion should have been. Stumbling up on deck long before the beginning of the forenoon watch, he saw Shawn on the quarterdeck deep in a stillness of his own, ignoring Tom Ball who muttered at him, and Joey Mills who stood by the helm but had nothing to do there, for the _Diana_ had lost all way, the sails were dead rags, and if some profound current still moved her there was nothing to tell of it in this deathlike air under a brazen sun.