For these there may be, after all, another world somewhere in the recurrent quotient which runs indefinitely out into the stars.
With these vague philosophizings, these morbid self-queryings, there came into conflict the sterner and more practical side of Franklin's nature, itself imperious and positive in its demands.

Thus he found himself, in his rude surroundings on the Plains, a man still unsettled and restless, ambitious for success, but most of all ambitious with that deadly inner ambition to stand for his own equation, to be himself, to reach his own standards; that ambition which sends so many broken hearts into graves whose headstones tell no history.

Franklin wondered deliberately what it must be to succeed, what it must be to achieve.

And he wondered deliberately what it must mean to love, to find by good fortune or by just deserts, voyaging somewhere in the weltering sea of life, in the weltering seas of all these unmoved stars, that other being which was to mean that he had found himself.
To the searcher who seeks thus starkly, to the dreamer who has not yielded; but who has deserved his dream, there can be no mistaking when the image comes.
Therefore to Edward Franklin the tawdry hotel parlour on the morning after the ball at Ellisville was no mere four-square habitation, but a chamber of the stars.

The dingy chairs and sofas were to him articles of joy and beauty.