The voice and the vision had seemed so real to
him that he looked about him tremblingly into the starlit gloom of the
forest, as if not quite sure that he had been dreaming. Then he crawled
into his balsam shelter, drew his blankets about him, and fell asleep.
The next day he had little to say to his Indian companion as they made
their way downstream. At each dip of their paddles a deeper sickness seemed
to enter into his heart. Life, after all, he tried to reason, was like a
tailored garment. One might have an ideal, and if that ideal became a
realization it would be found a misfit for one reason or another. So he
told himself, in spite of fill the dreams which had urged him on in the
fight for better things. There flooded upon him now the forceful truth of
what Ransom had said. His work, as he had begun it, was at an end, his
fabric of idealism had fallen into ruins. For he had found all that was
ideal--love, faith, purity, and beauty--and he, Roscoe Cummins, the
idealist, had repulsed them because they were not dressed in the tailored
fashion of his kind. He told himself the truth with brutal directness.
Before him he saw another work in his books, but of a different kind; and
each hour that passed added to the conviction within him that at last that
work would prove a failure.
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