the earth or built, like you, great dreams of glory—to be obsequious tributes to a rich man’s fame. Yes, you, even you—poor naked child—may come to this—to reach this state, to be entombed here, bought and idle among the forgotten huge encumbrance of a rich man’s arrogant possession—and to know at last that all the glory, genius, and magic of a poet’s life may lie condensed in six rich bindings, forgotten, purchased and unread—and finally defeated by the only thing in life that lusts and will triumph for ever—the all-causing tyranny of wealth that makes a slave of its great poets—that makes us the barren prostitutes of fame, the pimps of wealth—unused and empty on a rich man’s shelf.”
So did that great treasure of unread, purchased, and forgotten books speak to him in the silent watches of the night, as they stood there, lonely, small and bought, on a rich man’s shelf.
Towards morning, as he sat there with a great book propped upon his knees, his mind filled with the thought of those dead, forgotten, and still-living voices and of his rich young friend and the strange and bitter enigma of the fatal severance which had seemed that day to close a great door between their lives for ever, he turned the pages of the book idly, and suddenly the blurred characters on the page before him swam legibly to view. And what those words upon the page before him said was this:
"The young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?
"Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.
“But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.”
LXVII
As he and Joel drove to the station it seemed to Eugene that he was returning to a world from which he had been absent for years. And the return was not a pleasant one. As they entered the little town, and began to drive swiftly down a street that led to the station, the little frame houses with their new architectures—their faded little strips of “front-yard” grass, cement walks, and cement-yard walls, looked cheap, flimsy, new
