his friend’s eyes narrowed with professional appraisal as he looked at the hot opacity of the sun-burnished tree and said, “—hm… It’s nice that—the light is interesting—I’d like to do it;” and the embarrassed but almost stubbornly definite way in which Joel had asked him to put on his coat as he went past “Grandfather’s place.” He did not know why, but that simple request aroused in him a feeling of quick and hot resentment, a desire to say:
“Good God! What kind of idol-worship is this, anyway? Surely that old man has been made of the same earth as all the rest of us—surely he’s not so grand and rare and fine that he can’t stand the sight of two young men in shirt-sleeves going by his house!… Surely there is something false, inhuman, barren in this kind of reverence—no real respect, no decent human admiration, but something cruel, empty, worthless and untrue, and against the real warmth and worth and friendliness of man!”
For a moment hot resentful words rose to his lips: that act of empty reverence seemed to him, somehow, to be arrogant and disdainful of humanity; he felt a sudden blind resentment, a choking anger against old Mr. Joel and his grand manners and his growling and magnificent old age: he wanted to bring back again the conversation he had overheard at lunch, to ask Joel bitterly who the hell he thought this old man was that he could grandly dispose of man according to his judgment as “low cads,” as “gentlemen”—to inquire savagely who the hell this damned contriving, cunning old custodian of the treasures of the rich thought he was that he could arrogate unto himself the power to pronounce banishment on his betters—to call Rousseau a rascal, and De Musset and Lord Byron “a couple of low cads.”
And childish, foolish as this anger was in all its blind unreason, he was to remember these two trifling episodes in later years with a feeling of regret and nameless loss. These two acts on Joel’s part—the one an act of barren interest—a joyless empty interest in the blind opacity of light—and the other an act of barren joyless reverence to old age and an inhuman state—seemed to mark for him the beginning of his gradual separation from his friend, a dumb, inexplicable and sorrowful acceptation of their fatal severance. It seemed to him that here began that slow, and somehow desperately painful recognition that the enchanted world of wealth and love and beauty, of living fulfilment and of fruitful power, which he had visioned as a child in all his dreams about the fabled rich along the Hudson River—did not exist; and that he must look
