the loss of his first investments, his hatred of property. It was in Sydney that he had met and wedded the sainted Cynthia, the tubercular spinstress who had died within two years of their marriage.
Their father’s great ghost haunted them: it brooded over the town, above the scouring oblivion of the years that wipes all trace of us away.
Together, they hunted down into the mean streets, until they stood at length before a dreary shop on the skirts of the negro district.
“This must be it,” she said. “His shop stood here. It’s gone now.”
She was silent a moment. “Poor old Papa.” She turned her wet eyes away.
There was no mark of his great hand on this bleak world. No vines grew round the houses. That part of him which had lived here was buried—buried with a dead woman below the long gray tide of the years. They stood quietly, frightened, in that strange place, waiting to hear the summons of his voice, with expectant unbelief, as some one looking for the god in Brooklyn.
In April the nation declared war on Germany. Before the month was out, all the young men at Pulpit Hill who were eligible—those who were twenty-one—were going into service. At the gymnasium he watched the doctors examine them, envying the careless innocence with which they stripped themselves naked. They threw off their clothes in indifferent heaps and stood, laughing and certain, before the doctors. They were clean-limbed, sound and white of tooth, graceful and fast in their movements. The fraternity men joined first—those merry and extravagant snobs of whom he had never known, but who now represented for him the highest reach of urbane and aristocratic life. He had seen them, happy and idle, on the wide verandas of their chapter houses—those temples where the last and awful rites of initiation were administered. He had seen them, always together, and from the herd of the uninitiated always apart, laughing over their mail at the post-office, or gambling for “
