III


There was a touch of idealism hidden away somewhere in Martin's
character. A more than usually keen-eyed boy had once called him
"the poet" at school. In order that this dubious nickname should be
strangled at birth, there had been an epoch-making fight. Both lads
came out of it in a more or less unrecognizable condition, but
Martin reestablished his reputation and presently entered Yale free
from the suspicion of being anything but a first-rate sportsman and
an indisputable man.

There Martin had played football with all the desired bullishness.
He had hammered ragtime on the piano like the best ordinary man in
the University. With his father he rode to hounds hell for leather,
and he wrote comic stuff in a Yale magazine which made him
admiringly regarded as a sort of junior George Ade. It was only in
secret, and then with a sneaking sense of shame, that he allowed his
idealistic side to feed on Browning and Ruskin, Maeterlinck and
Barrie, and only when alone on vacation that he bathed in the beauty
of French cathedrals, sat thrilled and stirred by the waves of
melody of the great composers, drew up curiously touched and awed at
the sight of the places in the famous cities of Europe that echoed
with the footsteps of history.

If the ideality of that boy had been seized upon and developed by a
sympathetic hand, if his lively imagination and passion for the
beautiful had been put through a proper educational course, he might
have used the latent creative power with which nature had endowed
him and taken a high place among artists, writers or composers. As