one more despairing attempt but ended by burning her record. "Futile" was the word she had used for it.
He walked on and on through the streets—afraid.
For two years Paul lived in Vienna, supplementing his savings by sums earned as accompanist for violinists and singers. His tardy discovery that music was an art rather than a philosophy was followed by the realization of his abysmal want of knowledge. Disappointed in the studios, he was arrested by the libraries. He was bewildered by the scope of human erudition and appalled by his own nescience.
Only when he reminded himself that, like differently prepared foodstuffs in a grocer's shop, all knowledge must be reducible to a comparatively small number of ingredients, did he have courage to take his education in hand. Then with feverish zeal he gave himself over to the task. Works on every subject, from sex to sunspots, in German, English and French—he tackled one by one. His most momentous finds were in the realm of speculative thought. Schopenhauer, Marx, Taussig, Bergson, and a dozen minor thinkers, he weighed in his balance. Each battered at the wall of truth from a different angle; each made breaches; none got through. Yet despite the accretions he was stuffing into his mental store-room, there was no longer a sense of chaos. A reliable principle of selection was quietly at work, ranging facts and opinions on shelves from which they could be readily reached down in case of discussion.
Of discussion there was plenty, for he inevitably came into contact with men who were artists and philosophers by virtue of their youth if not their talent. Their elders, weary of trying to know everything, had in most cases adopted some theory upon which, as upon string suspended in water, they could crystallize all the facts they
