questions. Already the sculptor Life was chiselling away the
easy curves with the tool of responsibility.

He thought of other things sometimes as he sat before the wood fire
in his old Morris chair. His college desk was in the corner by the
window, and around it hung photographs ordered much as they had
been in New Haven. The portrait of his father on the desk, the
painting of his mother, and above them, among the boys' faces,
the group of boys and girls of whom she was one, the girl whom
he had not forgotten. He had not seen her since that Tap Day.
She had written him soon after--an invitation for a week-end at
her mother's camp in the woods. But he would not go. He sat
in the big chair staring at the fire, this small room in the West,
and thought about it. No, he could not have gone to her house
party--how could he? He had thought, poor lunatic, that there
was an unspoken word between them; that she was different to him
from what she was to the others. Then she had failed him at the
moment of need. He would not be taken back half-way, with the
crowd. He could not. So he had civilly ignored the hand which
had held out several times, in several ways. Hurt and proud,
yet without conceit, he believed that she kept him at a distance,
and would not risk coming too near, and so stayed altogether away.
It happens at times that a big, attractive, self-possessed man
is secretly as shy, as fanciful, as the shyest girl--if he cares.
Once and again indeed the idea flashed into the mind of Johnny
McLean--that perhaps she had been so sorry that she did not dare
look at him. But he flung that aside with a savage half-thought.

"What rot! It's probable that I was important enough for that,
isn't it? You fool!" And about then he was likely to get up with