How pale she was! But still she
played. And now he understood what that twilight was.
It was a world beyond the consciousness of daily life--and that
world belonged to him. "Peer, let me stay here." And something in him
answered: "Yes, you shall stay, Louise. Even though there is no God and
no immortality, you shall stay here." And then she smiled. And still she
played. And it was as though he were building a little vaulted chapel
for her in defiance of Heaven and of God--as though he were ringing
out with his own hands a great eternal chime for her sake. What was
happening to him? There was none to comfort him, yet it ended, as he
lay there, with his pouring out something of his innermost being, as an
offering to all that lives, to the earth and the stars, until all seemed
rocking, rocking with him on the stately waves of the psalm. He lay
there with fast-closed eyes, stretching out his hands as though afraid
to wake, and find it all nothing but a beautiful dream.
Chapter VII
The two-o'clock bell at the Technical College had just begun to ring,
and a stream of students appeared out of the long straggling buildings
and poured through the gate, breaking up then into little knots and
groups that went their several ways into the town.
It was a motley crowd of young men of all ages from seventeen to thirty
or more. Students of the everlasting type, sent here by their parents as
a last resource, for--"he can always be an engineer"; young sparks who
paid more attention to their toilet than their books, and hoped to
"get through somehow" without troubling to work; and stiff youths of
soldierly bearing, who had been ploughed for the Army, but who likewise
could "always be engineers.
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