chicken coop had hatched a gosling that wanted to swim in strange waters; but it was eventually decided that goslings were meant to swim and would one way or another find a pond.  Indeed, Harvey Whipple was prouder of his son by adoption than he cared to have known, and listened to him with secret respect, covered with perfunctory business hints.  He felt that Merle was above and beyond him.  The youth, indeed, made him feel that he was a mere country banker.

In the city of New York, after his graduation, Merle had come into his own, forming a staunch alliance with a small circle of intellectuals—­intelligentzia, Merle said—­consecrated to the cause of American culture.  He had brought to Newbern and to the amazed Harvey Whipple the strange news that America had no native culture; that it was raw, spiritually impoverished, without national self-consciousness; with but the faintest traces of art in any true sense of the word.  Harvey Whipple would have been less shocked by this disclosure, momentous though it was, had not Merle betrayed a conviction that his life work would now be to uphold the wavering touch of civilization.

This brought the thing home to Harvey D. Merle, heading his valiant little band of thinkers, would light a pure white flame to flush America’s spiritual darkness.  He would be a vital influence, teaching men and women to cultivate life for its own sake.  For the cheap and tawdry extravagance of our national boasting he would substitute a chastening knowledge of our spiritual inferiority to the older nations.  America was uncreative; he would release and nurse its raw creative intelligence till it should be free to function, breaking new intellectual paths, setting up lofty ideals, enriching our common life with a new, self-conscious art.  Much of this puzzled Harvey D. and his father, old Gideon.  It was new talk in their world.  But it impressed them.  Their boy was earnest, with a fine intelligence; he left them stirred.

Sharon Whipple was a silent, uneasy listener at many of these talks.  He declared, later and to others, for Merle was not his son, that the young man was highly languageous and highly crazy; that his talk was the crackling of thorns under a pot; that he was a vain canter—­“forever canting,” said Sharon—­“a buffle-headed fellow, talking, bragging.”  He was equally intolerant of certain of Merle’s little band of forward-looking intellectuals who came to stay week-ends at the Whipple New Place.  There was Emmanuel Schilsky, who talked more pithily than Merle and who would be the editor-in-chief of the projected New Dawn.  Emmanuel, too, had come from his far-off home to flush America’s spiritual darkness with a new light.  He had written much about our shortage of genuine spiritual values; about “the continual frustrations and aridities of American life.”  He was a member of various groups—­the Imagist group, the Egoist group, the Sphericists, other groups piquantly named; versed in the new psychology, playing upon the word “pragmatism” as upon a violin.