to its own nature. Sometimes they twinkled shrewdly, comprehendingly; sometimes they glowed with a steady splendor that seemed to dominate the world. There were nights when the separate stars were blended, to his apprehension, in one great symphony of meaning; again certain ones stood out among the others, individual and apart. There was Jupiter up there. He did not look as if he were revolving with lightning speed about the sun, and the moons revolving about him were not even visible. That was the kind of roulette wheel a man might really take an interest in! And while he dallied with the stars and with those higher promptings which their radiance symbolized, he yet clung persistently to the purely artificial bonds he had put upon himself.
Poor Dabney Dirke! If he had possessed the saving grace of humor he could not have dedicated the golden years of youth to anything so hopelessly chimerical and absurd. He would have perceived that he was enacting the part of an inverted Don Quixote; a character grotesque enough when planted on its own erratic legs, but hopelessly ridiculous when made to stand on its head and defy its windmills up-side-down. As it was, he continued to take himself seriously, and to argue with
