Free Girl Takes The Oath (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 5) by Jacques Antoine Page A

only to turn back a second later with furtive smiles.
    “In Plato’s Republic , Socrates hints at something ‘beyond being,’ which he names the Good,” the lecturer continued. “By contrast, Aristotle’s first principle is pure intelligibility, a mind which thinks nothing but its own thinking. A few centuries later, Plotinus concedes Aristotle’s point, the world is intelligible to rational man, but only because it’s highlighted against a more primal horizon that must itself be beyond intelligibility.”
    As strange as Aristotle’s notion of divinity seemed to her, Emily found the Plotinian idea of a sheltering horizon comforting, a sort of confirmation of her recurring feeling of the darkness lurking in her own heart. The meaningfulness of things is not simply a matter of their intelligibility , she mused. Other eyes watched her, and when she scanned the audience, she noticed no other midshipmen, no other uniforms. The attention of several young people, obviously students—uncombed hair, loose clothes, blue jeans and rumpled shirts—bent her way intermittently, though their interest hardly exceeded the most casual curiosity.
    On the other hand, the whispers of the two Asian girls betrayed something steadier, deeper-rooted. It was hard not to let it distract her from the lecturer’s explanation of the tension between rationalism and mysticism in medieval theology. By the time he reached the modern era, and the German romantics, she could sense where his argument had to end up.
    “ ‘For to the lost, she is holy, and to the dead, but herself stands firm, eternal, the freest spirit’,” he said, quoting from Hölderlin again. “But what sort of freedom is this? Surely not the freedom of modern political life, with its self-serving antitheses between constraint and individualism. The poet’s freedom speaks from the terror of spiritual isolation, and the distant call of a courage that may not have been seen for millennia.”
    “Of course,” Emily thought. “Which means he has to call for some sort of return to the ancient gods, to Dionysus and Demeter. It’s easy to say, but what does it actually mean? How would one even live like that?”
    Later, standing on the edge of the milling crowd in the lobby, alone by a large ficus tree spreading along the floor-to-ceiling windows that formed one wall of the building, Emily tipped her head to Ed Braswell and his partner, who lounged by the main entrance with studied non-chalance. He frowned and gave his head a subtle shake, as if signaling to discourage her from drawing attention to their presence. On the other side of the room, the two Asian girls caught her eye again, one timid, the other bold, both curious about her. When she smiled at them, they scurried over, one pulling the other by the hand.
    After a moment of nervous giggles and ridiculous modesty, Emily decided to break the ice for them.
    “Did you enjoy the lecture?”
    “No,” the taller one replied, pulling her long, straight black hair over one shoulder in a bit of dramatic showiness. “It was too mystical for me.”
    “I used to have hair like yours,” Emily said. “I miss it.”
    “Did you have to cut it for the Navy?”
    “I suppose I would have had to, but I’d already cut it before then,” she said, reflecting on the fraught circumstances of some of her haircuts. “I can guess from your accent that you’re not from around here.”
    “No, you are right. I am from Nanjing.”
    “If I may be permitted to inquire, how did you find your way to this obscure outpost of civilization?”
    “It is not easy to get into university in China these days.”
    “So I’ve heard,” Emily said. “But isn’t this place a peculiar choice? I mean, it’s so small, and so much about western things.”
    “My father wants me to learn about the west,” the quieter girl said. “He says it might be useful for business.”
    “My name is Diao Chan,” the taller girl said in a leading tone, nudging