But this glittering world, to attain a place in which is the object of most of the struggles and hungry competition of modern life, seemed not so real nor so desirable when he was at home with Edith, and in his gradually growing interest in nobler pursuits.  They had decided to take a modest apartment in town for the winter, and almost before the lease was signed, Edith, in her mind, had transformed it into a charming home.  Jack used to rally her on her enthusiasm in its simple furnishing; it reminded him, he said, of Carmen’s interest in her projected house of Nero.  It was a great contrast, to be sure, to their stately house by the Park, but it was to them both what that had never been.  To one who knows how life goes astray in the solicitations of the great world, there was something pathetic in Edith’s pleasure.  Even to Jack it might some day come with the force of keen regret for years wasted, that it is enough to break a body’s heart to see how little a thing can make a woman happy.

It was another summer.  Major Fairfax had come down with Jack to spend Sunday at the Golden House.  Edith was showing the Major the view from the end of the veranda.  Jack was running through the evening paper.  “Hi!” he cried; “here’s news.  Mavick is to have the mission to Rome, and it is rumored that the rich and accomplished Mrs. Henderson, as the wife of the minister, will make the Roman season very gay.”

“It’s too bad,” said Edith.  “Nothing is said about the training-school?”

“Nothing.”  “Poor Henderson!” was the Major’s comment.  “It was for this that he drudged and schemed and heaped up his colossal fortune!  His life must look to him like a burlesque.”

THAT FORTUNE

By Charles Dudley Warner

On a summer day, long gone among the summer days that come but to go, a lad of twelve years was idly and recklessly swinging in the top of a tall hickory, the advance picket of a mountain forest.  The tree was on the edge of a steep declivity of rocky pasture-land that fell rapidly down to the stately chestnuts, to the orchard, to the cornfields in the narrow valley, and the maples on the bank of the amber river, whose loud, unceasing murmur came to the lad on his aerial perch like the voice of some tradition of nature that he could not understand.

He had climbed to the topmost branch of the lithe and tough tree in order to take the full swing of this free creature in its sport with the western wind.  There was something exhilarating in this elemental battle of the forces that urge and the forces that resist, and the harder the wind blew, and the wider circles he took in the free air, the more stirred the boy was in the spring of his life.  Nature was taking him by the hand, and it might be that in that moment ambition was born to achieve for himself, to conquer.