mulate even in the garrulous letter to Geoffrey which lay unfinished on his knees. "I wouldn't put it past Fate," he scribbled, "to do me out of my year in Europe, just when the prospect of it is beginning to appeal to me as my one hope of salvation—
Salvation? Of what?
Postponing the Insoluble, he took refuge at the piano. A certain dozen of Scriabin preludes were still new enough to serve both as a stimulant and an anaesthetic.
As he played his lips went into an affectionate smile at the postscript of his mother's letter: a warning not to overtire his poor dear eyes but to go to see Dr. Tinley at once. "Emma Sipe went to him when she was studying at Radcliffe," his mother added, "and they (presumably the good doctor's reading glasses) did her so much good." Grover questioned whether society was much the gainer for the fact that that fright, meaning Emma, could read fifty more pages of John Stuart Mill at a stretch than formerly; but in any case one thing was certain, and that was that his poor dear eyes would never be ruined by the Holy Roman Empire, nor Dryden, nor The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
What countless bundles of assorted information had arrived at his mind's door these last four years! What capricious showers of ideas had drenched him—only to evaporate and leave him with a mental cold. Today it seemed that all the mental energyzing of recent
