reveals you to yourself, but drives you back again ruthlessly into yourself, where you know you belong but where you dread having to stay, eternally and eternally,—especially, just as you had begun to learn the technique of being objective. If there were only some one to tell you what life was all about. But there was nobody. Even the Geoffrey Saints had strict limitations. You had to find out for yourself, and it was like a frog climbing out of a well: for every inch forward, a slip backward, into the same old perplexities, forever and forever. His state of mind was not unlike that of a man who has hidden a twenty dollar bill for safe keeping. Needing it in an emergency he looks in the same old pitchers, and it's probably right there on a shelf, yet he can't for the life of him find it, and all he knows is that he's worth twenty dollars. All Grover knew for sure was that he was a man of balance, but where his damn equilibrium had gone, God alone could tell.
It's unfortunate, he was thinking, to be the sort of man whose depths can be stirred by the color of somebody's hair. For being stirred by the color of somebody's hair is like building on shifting sands, and it means that a good part of one's life is devoted to re-building,—with diminishing faith in the worth of the effort. Diminishing faith, but thank heaven—and it was little enough by way of compensation,—increasing dexterity. He gloomily supposed that a wise man ended by devising a sort of cheap portable house that
