silvery, cloud-flaked sky; when white clouds sailed swiftly, and soft
spring breezes were hastening past; when, in a word, all things seemed
to be making for some place, unknown, afar-off, where he was not, then
he, too, was seized with a desire to be moving, to strap on a knapsack
and be gone, to wander through foreign countries, to see strange
cities and hear strange tongues, was unconsciously filled with the
desire to taste, lighthearted, irresponsible, the joys and experiences
of the WANDERJAHRE, before settling down to face the
matter-of-factnesss of life. And as the present continually pushed the
realisation of his dreams into the future, he satisfied the immediate
thirst of his soul by playing the flute, and by breathing into the
thin, reedy tones he drew from it, all that he dreamed of, but would
never know. For he presently came to a place in his life where two
paths diverged, and he was forced to make a choice between them. It
was characteristic of the man that he chose the way of least
resistance, and having married, more or less improvidently, he turned
his back on the visions that had haunted his youth: afterwards, the
cares, great and small, that came in the train of the years, drove
them ever further into the background. Want of sympathy in his
home-life blunted the finer edges of his nature; of a gentle and
yielding disposition, he took on the commonplace colour of his
surroundings. After years of unhesitating toil, it is true, the most
pressing material needs died down, but the dreams and ambitions had
died, too, never to come again. And as it is in the nature of things
that no one is less lenient towards romantic longings than he who has
suffered disappointment in them, who has failed to transmute them into
reality, so, in this case, the son's first tentative leanings to a
wider life, met with a more deeply-rooted, though less decisive,
opposition, on the part of the father than of the mother.