And in the meantime both men, and other men likewise, went about their

daily affairs. Vancouver grew and prospered, and the growth of Summit

sales left an increasing balance on the profit side of Thompson's

ledger. Moreover the rapid and steady growth of his business kept his

mind on the business. It worked out--his business preoccupation--much in

the manner of the old story of fleas and dogs, to wit: a certain number

of fleas is good for a dog. They keep him from brooding over the fact

that he is a dog.

So, save for the fact that he continued to make money and was busy and

realized now and then that he had come to a disheartening impasse with

Sophie, the late spring of 1916 found Thompson mentally, morally and

spiritually holding fast by certain props.

He had come a long way, and he had yet a long way to go. He had come to

Lone Moose very much after the fashion of St. Simeon Stylites all

prepared to mount a spiritual pillar and make a bid for sainthood. But

pillar hermits, he discovered, when harsh, material facts tore the

evangelistic blinkers off his eyes, were neither useful in the world nor

acceptable on high. He had been in a very bad way for awhile. When a man

loses his own self-respect and the faith of his fathers at one stroke he

is apt to suffer intensely. Thompson had not quite reached that pass,

when he came down to Wrangel by the sea, but he was not far off. When he

looked back, he could scarcely trace by what successive steps he had

traveled. But he had got up out of that puddle into which a harsh

environment and wounded egotism had cast him. He was in a way to be what

the world called a success.

He was not so sure of that himself. But he stayed himself with certain

props, as before mentioned. The base of more than one of these useful

supports had been undermined some time before by a sequence of events

which presented the paradox of being familiar to him and still beyond

his comprehension.

He was a long way from being aware, in those early summer days of 1916,

that before long some of the aforementioned props were to buckle under

him with strange and disturbing circumstance.




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