noise: the age of myth and miracle had come upon the world again. All things were possible.
He went home stretched like a bowstring and announced his intention of going away into Virginia. There was protest, but not loud enough to impede him. Eliza’s mind was fastened on real-estate and the summer trade. Gant stared into the darkness at his life. Helen laughed at him and scolded him; then fell to plucking at her chin, absently.
“Can’t do without her? You can’t fool me! No, sir. I know why you want to go,” she said jocularly. “She’s a married woman now: she may have a baby, for all you know. You’ve no right to go after her.”
Then abruptly, she said:
“Well, let him go if he wants to. It looks silly to me, but he’s got to decide for himself.”
He got twenty-five dollars from his father—enough to pay his railway fare to Norfolk and leave him a few dollars.
“Mark my words,” said Gant. “You’ll be back in a week’s time. It’s a wild-goose chase you’re going on.”
He went.
All through the night he drew toward her across Virginia, propped on his elbow in the berth and staring bewitched upon the great romantic country clumped with dreaming woodlands and white as a weird dawn beneath the blazing moonlight.
Early in the morning he came to Richmond. He had to change trains; there was a wait. He went out from the station and walked up the hill toward the fine old State House drenched cleanly in the young morning light. He ate breakfast at a lunchroom on Broad Street, filled already with men going to their work. This casual and brief contact with their lives, achieved after his lonely and magnificent approach through the night, thrilled him by its very casualness. All the little ticking sounds of a city beginning its day, the strange familiarity of voices in an alien place, heard curiously after the thunder of the wheels, seemed magical and unreal. The city had no existence save that which he conferred on it: he wondered how it had lived before he came, how it would live after he left. He looked at all the men,
