life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about the country like
Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen him driving at
evening through the street to Freedom's house, going in and out of
Wildman's, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew
that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of
which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John Telfer, the
talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had come back to
her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of the road, and
talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother, of marriage and of
coming to live with him in his house. She stood, chilled, looking into the
eager, strong face and the eyes with the pained, dazed look in them.

Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to Sam,
and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.

"It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you," he began, "it was
because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired of
them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little
schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew
tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks and
looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to get
out of there and into the streets myself."

Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and stared
into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from his trousers
legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to reconstruct an
old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer's, that had years before
come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and Telfer had made of the
ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central figure, a stoop-shouldered,
feeble old man stumbling along the street, muttering to himself and poking