performed by the chorus in a Greek tragedy—­that it shrilly voiced the horrors of the actual in the face of a divine indifference—­and strenuously insisted upon the importance of the eternal detail.  From Connie he had gathered that the feminine mind tended naturally toward a material philosophy—­toward a deification of the body, a faith in the fugitive allurement of the senses, and because of his earlier initiation he had taken Laura’s intellectual radiance as the shining of a virtually disembodied spirit.  His own senses had led him, he recognised now, to disastrous issues; his love for Connie had been the prompting of mere physical impulse, and he had emerged from it with a feeling of escaping into freedom.  Too much Nature he had learned during those months of mental apathy is in its way quite as destructive as too little—­there must be a soul in desire to keep it alive, he understood at last, or the perishing body of it will decay for lack of a vital flame in the very hour of its fulfilment.  A colder man might have come to such knowledge along impersonal paths, a coarser one would never have gone beyond it, but in Adams the old fighting spirit—­a survival of the uncompromising Puritan conscience—­had brought him up again, soul and body, to struggle afresh for a cleaner and a sharper air.  Life had meant more to him in the beginning than a mere series of sensations—­more even than any bodily conditions, any material attainment; and it was the final triumph of his austere vision that it should mean most of all when it seemed to a casual glance to contain least of actual value.

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH A YOUNG MAN DREAMS DREAMS

Since coming to New York Mrs. Trent had taken a small apartment in a big apartment house, where she lived with her son a perfectly provincial as well as a strictly secluded life.  She was a large, florid, motherly old lady who still wore mourning for a husband who had been killed while fox hunting twenty-five years ago.  Her face resembled a friendly and auspicious full moon, and above it her shining hair rolled like a parting of silvery clouds.  Day or night she was always engaged in knitting a purple shawl, which appeared never to have been finished since her son’s infancy, for his earliest recollection was of the plump, soft balls of brilliant yarn and the long ivory knitting needles which clicked briskly while she worked with a pleasant, familiar sound.  To this day the clicking of those needles brought to his mouth the taste of large slices of bread and jam, and to his ears the soothing murmur of Bible stories told in the twilight.

She was always, too, serene gossip that she was, full of a monotonous, rippling stream of words, and if her days in New York were trying to her body and burdened with homesickness for her heart, no one—­not even St. George himself—­had ever surprised so much as a passing shadow upon her face.  The young man’s untiring pursuit of managers and of players had left her continually alone, but she busied herself cheerfully about her housekeeping, and found diversion in yielding to an inordinate curiosity concerning her neighbours.  Once or twice she had questioned him about his absence, and this was especially so the morning after his meeting with Laura Wilde.