Dick turned away and stared out of the winter window, stirred by his own

words into a strange new understanding of himself--a mere fatuous

self-believer, a man who trusted to fate not fight, to fortune not to

mastery, who had not made his standards, but let them make themselves.

And now it was come to this, that a half-hour in a room with a foolish

girl was the turning-point in his life.

He seemed strange to himself, as though he were examining a life from

the outside rather than from the inside, and fumbling at its real

meaning.

He had done no wrong; but what does the march of events care whether the

failure be intentional or careless? Results follow just the same.

There flashed before his inward eye the face of his long-dead father,

white and set with some inward pain of which he did not speak. Dick

remembered that as a boy that had seemed to him a pitiful thing. Now he

saw it somewhat as the believers once saw the face of the martyr, the

visible manifestation of triumph--the success of being true to yourself

in spite of all the world.

Dick drew a long breath and dropped his boyhood without even a regret.

He knew he could accept conditions and limitations and not kick against

the pricks, but quietly, as one who is capable of being superior to

them. The bitterness, the depression of an hour, two hours, ago faded

into trifles, and the thing nearest to his consciousness was that dead

father who had had his wound and lived his life in spite of it; nearer,

infinitely nearer, than the living wife whom a slight noise brought to

his remembrance. He had forgotten her. She belonged now to the elements

outside his dearest life.

He turned toward Lena, waiting, silent, uncomprehending,--poor little

Lena, a woman who could never be anything more. He felt a wave of

strange new pity for her, unlike the pity he had once experienced for

her poverty of body, a sorrow, this, for what she was in herself, his

wife--poor, poor little child!

Lena sat still, picking at the bit of paper, but she looked up now,

moved in spite of herself by the exultant ring in Dick's voice, as he

strode over to her and held out both his hands.

"And so we begin again--honestly, this time. Perhaps some day you'll

come to accept my standards inwardly as well as outwardly. Perhaps

you'll even come to love me, some day, little wife."

Lena took his hands submissively. Her small tyranny, her stock of little

ambitions had slipped from her and she shivered as though she was

stripped and cold; but behind there was a kind of delight in this new

Dick, with authoritative eyes into which she stared, wondering still,

with trepidation, what he was going to make of her life.




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