For that matter, everything was wedded to something else. All the noble metals seemed to happen together. The osmium and iridium in the tip of her fountain pen were so much alike that they could be called by the name osmiridium. Perhaps all the world was like that, one stuff with different appearances. Had not her planet once been something very hot and uniform, which had cooled in many shapes?

One evening, as they sat before the glowing coals, she coaxed her father to talk about the one substance. He told her of Thales, who thought it water; of Anaximenes, who thought it air; of Heraclitus, who saw the earth as ever-changing fire; of the Stoics, who thought that God’s reason is a creative fire forming the earth and preserving it, a doctrine which Lucretius could not abide; of Plato, who conceived earth as made of little cubes and fire of little pyramids.

For Ambrose Rich all these substances were evidently only forms of thought. He was chary of expressing opinions, but his daughter fancied that nothing was real to him except thought. For him the splendidly broken living coals did not fade into atoms but into spirit.

In Jean’s mind they met no such fate. The indescribable glow, far too delicate and luminous to be called red, was to her the actual glow of atoms. She did not attribute the color to her mind. What she longed for was keener senses to see into the heart of things.

And if she was inclined to agree with Heraclitus, it is hardly necessary to ascribe her feeling to her wintry isolation or her longing for Marvin’s warm clasp. It is human nature to love the fire that burns in its own veins.

She often reflected that anything will burn. Nothing is so solid or so wet but it can fade away in heat. Some day the whole round earth would vanish as a round knot of birch vanishes up the chimney. She was not to be deceived by the cold look of ice or silica, for you never could tell what might happen.

So February sped along and the spring of 1920 approached. The warm round crystal called earth made its way through the interstellar spaces and tipped its darkened pole into the sun’s rays. The ice began to melt, keeping its chill to the last lump. Everything else began to expand a little, as if softly burning. Inert snails and frogs and buds began to swell. The pussywillows came forth in gray velvet and stood near each other like bashful lovers, for male and female created He them.

Presently the hidden fires began to glow pink in arbutus among the pines, and ran like blue flame along the shore in violets, and then to fill the upland woods with the frank conflagration of adder’s tongue. Jean went about feeling fire of every imaginable temperature.

She delighted to call it out of all sorts of things in her laboratory and out of doors. With a bit of steel she struck fire from every part of her island. And having abandoned the impossible task of playing the elements on her little old rosewood piano, she contented herself with making up a melody for some words of Browning: