CHAPTER V

THE TURNING OF THE ROAD

At the close of the war Captain Edward Franklin returned to a shrunken
world. The little Illinois village which had been his home no longer
served to bound his ambitions, but offered only a mill-round of duties
so petty, a horizon of opportunities so restricted, as to cause in his
mind a feeling of distress equivalent at times to absolute abhorrence.
The perspective of all things had changed. The men who had once seemed
great to him in this little world now appeared in the light of a wider
judgment, as they really were--small, boastful, pompous, cowardly,
deceitful, pretentious. Franklin was himself now a man, and a man
graduated from that severe and exacting school which so quickly matured
a generation of American youth. Tall, finely built, well set up, with
the self-respecting carriage of the soldier and the direct eye of the
gentleman, there was a swing in his step not commonly to be found
behind a counter, and somewhat in the look of his grave face which
caused men to listen when he spoke. As his hand had fitted naturally a
weapon, so his mind turned naturally to larger things than those
offered in these long-tilled fields of life. He came back from the war
disillusionized, irreverent, impatient, and full of that surging
fretfulness which fell upon all the land. Thousands of young men,
accustomed for years to energy, activity, and a certain freedom from
all small responsibility, were thrust back at once and asked to adjust
themselves to the older and calmer ways of peace. The individual