And at the moment all this was going on his eye had caught the glint of a little green stone lying among all the grey meaningless stones in the gravel bed of a railroad track. That was in the late afternoon and the sun's rays had been caught and reflected by the little stone.

He had picked it up and the simple act of doing so had broken a kind of absurd determination within him. His fancy, unable at the moment to play over the facts of his life, had played over the stone. A man's fancy, the creative thing within him, was in reality intended to be a healing thing, a supplementary and healing influence to the working of the mind. Men sometimes did a thing they called, "going it blind," and at such moments did the least blind acts of their whole lives. The truth was that the mind working alone was but a one-sided, maimed thing.

"Hito, tito, there's no use my trying to become a philosopher." John Webster was stepping towards his daughter who was waiting for him to say or do something that had not yet been done. Now he was quite all right again. Some minute readjustment had taken place inside himself as it had on so many other occasions within the last few weeks.

Something like a gay mood had come over him. "In one evening I have managed to plunge pretty deeply down into the sea of life," he thought.

He became a little vain. There he was, a man of the middle class, who had lived all his life in a Wisconsin industrial town. But a few weeks before he had been but a colourless fellow in an almost altogether colourless world. For years he had been going along, just so, day after day, week after week, year after year, going along streets, passing people in the streets, picking his feet up and setting them down, thump thump, eating food, sleeping, borrowing money at banks, dictating letters in offices, going along thump thump, not daring to think or feel much of anything at all.

Now he could think more thoughts, have more fancies, while he took three or four steps across a room towards his daughter, than he had sometimes dared do in a whole year of his former life. There was a picture of himself in his fancy now that he liked.

In the fanciful picture he had climbed up to a high place above the sea and had taken off his clothes. Then he had run to the end of a cliff and had leaped off into space. His body, his own white body, the same body in which he had been living all through these dead years, was now making a long graceful arched curve against a blue sky.

That was rather nice too. It made a picture for the mind to take hold of and it was pleasant to think of one's body as making sharp striking pictures.