dream, even in nightmares. Nor was it possible for him to explain. How, then, could any anger which he might visit upon them benefit? And who was he, when it came to that, to assume the unassailable morality of a parent?

[Pg 37]

[Pg 38]

It came to this: That Arthur followed the marks of Lee's and Gay's snow-shoes mechanically, and raged, not against them, not against the world of men, but against himself. He had said once in jest that many an artistic impulse had been crushed by the camera and the pianola. But how pitifully true this had been in his own case! If he had been born into less indulgence, he might have painted, he might have played. The only son in a large family of daughters, his father and mother had worshipped the ground upon which his infant feet had trod. He had never known what it was to want anything. He had never been allowed to turn a hand to his own honest advantage. He was the kind of boy who, under less golden circumstances, would have saved his pocket-money and built with his own hands a boat or whatever he needed. There is a song: "I want what I want when I want it."[Pg 39] Arthur might have sung: "I get what I'm going to want and then I don't want it."

[Pg 39]

His contemporaries had greatly envied him, when, as a mere matter of justice, they should have pitied him. All his better impulses had been gnarled by indulgence. He had done things that showed natural ability; but of what use was that? He was too old now to learn to draw. He played rather delightfully upon the piano, or any other instrument, for that matter. To what end? He could not read a note.

There was nothing that Arthur could not have done, if he had been let alone. There were many things that he would have done.

At college he had seen in one smouldering flash of intuition how badly he had started in the race of life. When others were admiring his many brilliancies, he was mourning for the lost years when, under almost any guidance save that of his beloved father, he might have laid such sturdy foundations to future achievements—pedestals on which to erect statues.

Self-knowledge had made him hard for a season and cynical. As a tired sea-gull miscalculates distance and dips his wings into the sea, so Arthur, when he thought that he was merely flying low the better to see and to observe, had alighted[Pg 40] without much struggling in a pool of dissipation and vice.

[Pg 40]

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