Gloria’s voice broke in with strange appropriateness
upon his thoughts.
“I wonder where Bloeckman’s been this
summer.”
After the sureties of youth there sets in a period
of intense and intolerable complexity. With the
soda-jerker this period is so short as to be almost
negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer
in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of
relationship, to retain “impractical”
ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the
business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto
been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote
and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on
a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable.
The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values
are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality;
it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from
the past with which to face the future—so
we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested
in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute
rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value
safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously,
pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently
concerned with the nuances of relationships—and
even this few only in certain hours especially set
aside for the task.
Anthony Patch had ceased to be an individual of mental
adventure, of curiosity, and had become an individual
of bias and prejudice, with a longing to be emotionally
undisturbed. This gradual change had taken place
through the past several years, accelerated by a succession
of anxieties preying on his mind. There was,
first of all, the sense of waste, always dormant in
his heart, now awakened by the circumstances of his
position. In his moments of insecurity he was
haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after
all, significant. In his early twenties the conviction
of the futility of effort, of the wisdom of abnegation,
had been confirmed by the philosophies he had admired
as well as by his association with Maury Noble, and
later with his wife. Yet there had been occasions—just
before his first meeting with Gloria, for example,
and when his grandfather had suggested that he should
go abroad as a war correspondent—upon which
his dissatisfaction had driven him almost to a positive
step.
One day just before they left Marietta for the last
time, in carelessly turning over the pages of a Harvard
Alumni Bulletin, he had found a column which told
him what his contemporaries had been about in this
six years since graduation. Most of them were
in business, it was true, and several were converting
the heathen of China or America to a nebulous protestantism;
but a few, he found, were working constructively at
jobs that were neither sinecures nor routines.
There was Calvin Boyd, for instance, who, though barely
out of medical school, had discovered a new treatment
for typhus, had shipped abroad and was mitigating some
