along?" And on each day of the preceding week he had wakened and said to himself: "This is Monday--"--or whatever it might be--"and in four more days it will be Friday." In February he was sent home. Lily stayed on until the end of March. He went back to his little village of plain people, and took up life again as best he could. But sometimes it seemed to him that from behind every fire-lit window in the evenings--he was still wearing out shoe-leather, particularly at nights--somebody with a mandolin was wailing about the long, long trail. His mother watched him anxiously. He was thinner than ever, and oddly older, and there was a hollow look about his eyes that hurt her. "Why don't you bring home a bottle of tonic from the store, Willy," she said, one evening when he had been feverishly running through the city newspaper. He put the paper aside hastily. "Tonic!" he said. "Why, I'm all right, mother. Anyhow, I wouldn't take any of that stuff." He caught her eye and looked away. "It takes a little time to get settled again, that's all, mother." "The Young People's Society is having an entertainment at the church to-night, Willy." "Well, maybe I'll go," he agreed to her unspoken suggestion. "If you insist on making me a society man--" But some time later he came downstairs with a book. "Thought I'd rather read," he explained. "Got a book here on the history of steel. Talk about romances! Let me read some of it to you. You sit there and close your eyes and just listen to this: 'The first Cardew furnace was built in 1868. At that time--'" Some time later he glanced up. His mother was quietly sleeping, her hands folded in her lap. He closed the book and sat there, fighting again his patient battle with himself. The book on his knee seemed to symbolize the gulf between Lily Cardew and himself. But the real gulf, the unbridgeable chasm, between Lily and himself, was neither social nor financial. "As if that counted, in America," he reflected scornfully. No. It was not that. The war had temporarily broken down the old social barriers. Some of them would never be erected again, although it was the tendency of civilization for men to divide themselves, rather than to be divided, into
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