“ I waited for Dibdin.
And then suddenly, as is the way with me when I am at the bottom, my spirits bounded upward. Alicia would come back to me, I felt in a sudden surge of assurance. At that moment I felt sure that she was thinking of me, that she was yearning to return. And before I knew it, I was blocking in magnificent plans for her education, for making a splendid woman of her, even though she already seemed perfect, of supplementing nature's handiwork with all the force that was in me. I saw her resplendent, a shining creature, the woman of my dreams! What a florid designer is hope! ”

“ I am nothing more, I fear, than a contented voluptuary of a bookworm. Like King James, I feel that were it my fate to be a captive, I should wish to be shut up in a great library consuming my days among my fellow-prisoners, the blessed books.
To distil the reading of a lifetime into a little wisdom for my poor wits, that has been all my aim and my ambition, if by any name so dynamic as ambition I may call it. An old young man is what I have been called, and Gertrude seems propelled by some potent urge to change me—God knows why. ”

“ In some manner Alicia was endeavoring to stand between the boy and evil, shame, disgrace, sacrificing herself deliberately, resolutely, without a word to me—because it might "break my heart!" Through an empty barren landscape, with unseeing eyes, conscious only of a welter of incoherent thoughts and emotions, as though boiling in a vacuum, I made my way homeward. It might "break my heart!"
"And did ye walk too far?" Griselda came hurriedly to the entrance hall when she heard me.
"No—no! Greatest walk of my life," I laughed absently into her face. "Feel like another man." ”

“ A powerful inhibition suddenly held me arrested as in a vise. Both the curse and the blessing of middle age were inherent in that inhibition. If I had so much as touched her then, I knew in a flash of quivering intuition that the truth I had perforce so carefully guarded would be spilled like water. If I touched her then, I was lost!
Hastily I retreated a step or two. For a space of intense charged silence Alicia sat drying her eyes, a little crumpled Niobe, the while I with trembling fingers of the hand that was on my table fumbled stupidly in the cigarette box. ”

“ She is a woman—she is womanhood. I see her now in her radiance and every movement and gesture of her, every act, every glance speaks of the freshness and youth of life, of a supreme, a divine beauty. I have called her a child and I yearn to sink at her knees and cry out my anguish and my adoration. I am the child, helpless before her. Whatever I conceal, I cannot conceal what her going would do to me. It would shatter what remains of my life. And I suffered Pendleton yesterday to propose calmly that she go over to him—trafficking in Alicia!—and with Pendleton! It is stifling to think of. ”

“ I gasped, wondering what words or acts of mine had conveyed this elaborate strategy to Gertrude. For the space of a minute perhaps I was sunk in thought. The vision of the children asleep in their innocent faith in me suddenly arose vividly and smote me to the heart. The nestling image of Jimmie—the girl Alicia with her great, wistful eyes telling me that there was nothing to do "but just love them"—all this was throbbing in my brain with every heartbeat. And had I in reality schemed out the intricate design with which Gertrude now credited me? ”

“ A solemn, quite maternal tenderness in her face as she uttered those words so fascinated me that suddenly I saw her anew—a new Alicia—and with a strange tug at the heartstrings I marveled at the miracle.
I saw her suddenly not as a woman, but as Woman—the mother of mankind, the nurse, the nourisher of all the generations. There was in her eyes a something rapt and sybilline—she was the eternal maternal principle in nature, the keeper of man's destiny, older than I, as old as the race—the spirit of motherhood! ”

“ Books, for so long my mainstay and support, were now useless to me. I turned over many volumes idly but my mind no longer reacted to that old and magical alchemy. The volume of Epictetus that Dibdin had fingered might have been a seed catalogue, so remote it seemed and so null. I was now a ghost among my books: I was plunged in "The Woods of Westermain," and my memory flung me the lines:
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare. ”

“ But who can describe happiness?
Pendleton is gone, Alicia—the children are here.
No eight words in the language of Shakespeare and Milton have ever breathed to me the same meaning as those eight words. Yet what do they signify on paper?
All Europe is in a turmoil, and the Germans have all but taken Paris, yet this, I perceive, is my first mention of a vast catastrophe. What tiny self-absorbed creatures are men! People are dying and suffering by the thousands, yet we cisatlantians scan the headlines and pursue our own ends in the accustomed way. ”

“ Laura is only two years older than I, but how well she had understood and how sympathetic she was! It was the motherhood within her, I suppose, that drove her to the marriage and the kiddies.
The scent of those summers comes to my nostrils now, the fragrance of lilac and honeysuckle, that brought ideas to one's head, dreams of achievement, of perfection and happiness. Who has that cottage now, I wonder? Poor Laura's dreams have been distorted into a very dismal sort of reality. And what of my own? But here is Griselda and she is announcing Dibdin. ”

“ His father also was markedly good-looking when he married poor Laura. Have I, I wonder, been rearing another Pendleton?
But Alicia, the bright, the fair, the radiant, almost a woman now, with more wisdom than I ever before found in women—how came she to do such a thing as to engage herself to him? I can understand his possible infatuation. But a girl, I had always believed, learns her woman's arts by instinct. How can she be so blind to the boy's character and defects? Can it be that she really loves him? Love, love, love! ”

“ And I have dared to judge Pendleton!
The time-honored remedy in fiction, when a man finds himself in love with any one he has no business to love is, I believe, to go away, to travel. How ridiculous that sounds to me. The only place I can go to is Visconti's. To Visconti's! And now I have come back from Visconti's and I cannot stay in the house.
I cannot stay in the house because Alicia is in it—and Pendleton!
Oh, he will have his way, I am sure! The Old Man of the Sea infallibly has. Why should the unscrupulous always have the advantage? ”

“ I danced into the room in which Pendleton had not slept and with crazy gestures made as if to sweep his memory out of the garish window. I had saved the children and safeguarded Alicia.
I felt I had played the man. And let no man say he has lived until he has fought for those he loves. Inevitably my mind dwelt upon Alicia. Who is that child? What were her beginnings? Did she come out of the sea and chaos of life only to vanish in some bitter poignant dream like that of last night? ”

“ I want love, passionate love and children of my own loins and the beloved on my heart, and just the common run of happiness that a thousand thousand men are at this moment enjoying. Then why have I not taken it? Why have I not taken Alicia as King David took Bathsheba, or whatever the lady's name was, in virtue of sheer desire and power? Because I have been a finicking, hyper-refined, hyper-sensitive fool, my aged friend; and now that she is engaged to be married I should be—but now it's too late! Always, always, Randolph Byrd, you have been too late! ”

“ I endeavored with a heavy heart to match Alicia, and gradually I became absorbed in my task and in Jimmie, so that the darkness of life fell away from me. The water splashed and the ships tacked about in wild maneuvers, while Jimmie kept reminding me that "he was listening, Uncle Ranny."
The great mystics are those who submerge their intellect and senses into night so that their souls emerge before them like the full moon out of the blackness. ”

“ Laura, sweet and grave-faced like her mother, is never as hilarious as the rest of us often are. My nephew Randolph was also absent. He, I suppose, was dining at his eternal "frat house."
It occurred to me how happy we could be, just the three of us, Alicia, Jimmie and I—plus, of course, Griselda. Alicia is beautiful now with a tender coloring and movements of exuberant gayety that are like wine to the heart. When her face is animated and her eyes flashing with merriment, the house seems charged with the very elixir of delight. ”

“ How ridiculous Gertrude would make me, if she knew it!
I felt excitement and happiness bounding in my veins, a new quality of those emotions, the like of which I had never experienced before. And my heart positively missed a beat when the crushing thought struck me: Must I now lose these young creatures and pass again into the emptiness of life?
We Americans are like the French in that we think our climate the best in the world. Or, if not the best, at least so far superior to many others that, like the French, we are steeped in vanity about it. ”

“ It is sad, very sad, but it is nothing. It's you I am thinking of. Things happen, my dear. Life is like that. There is a lot of happiness and serenity in it. But you must not let this bite into your soul—it will pass, Alicia—it has passed already. I want you to return to your happy blissful self—the self that has made me—all of us—so happy—so very happy."
"I ask nothing more or better, Uncle Ranny," she pressed my hands with quick intense little movements, "than to be near you, to work and to—to serve you—that is all I ask in the world!" ”

“ I go on tramping the pavements of New York and I wish there were more point in my trampings.
Every morning I go forth with a faint glow of hope, and the dim basis of my hope, when I come to think it out, is something like this: In the haunts of men I may meet somebody, an old acquaintance who may know or hear of something whereby a broken reed like myself, a pronounced failure, may get the chance of earning a livelihood. A desperate enough situation when reduced to the glaring light of plain speech—but that is the best that I am able to do. If only Dibdin were here! ”

“ Still I was a groping elementary learner in life. Rage and depreciate myself as I would, I felt nevertheless that I was facing a problem momentarily beyond me, but which I urgently knew I must solve. If I had been blind, I could not continue blind. Suddenly, thought suspended as a bird sometimes hangs in the air, I seemed to be watching instinct taking command, instinct overriding thought and shame, rage and grief—instinct taking a pen and a cheque book and writing with my hand a check in Alicia's name for fifty dollars. ”

“ Can it be that the child has instinctively divined that I have actually broken with Gertrude on her account, that the little woman's soul in her secretly exults in a feeling of victory? Since she cannot know all the conditions, she can feel, at most, I suppose, only a vague primitive sense of triumph in defeating the will of another woman. Perhaps I am attributing too much to her young intelligence, but at times I seem to perceive in her eyes, in her bearing, a touch of the protective instinct, of almost the maternal toward me, that I had never observed in her before. ”

“ On a sudden I saw Jimmie standing beside me. Shame and chagrin overtook me and I bent down to him and begged him to forgive me.
"Don't you mind me, Uncle Ranny," he put his hand in mine. "I'm a man, and I know a man has got to swear sometimes."
"No, Jimmie—not if the man has brains enough with which to think."
That contact with the child, however, seemed to release something in my clamped and aching skull.
"Run, Jimmie," I said, "and send Alicia out to me. I wish to speak to her."
Jimmie, to whom commissions are delight, was off like an arrow. ”

“ She seized my hand, still holding my gaze with that starry look in her eyes that invariably probes deep and rests in my inmost soul.
"Something has hurt you, Uncle Ranny," she whispered tremulously, "and you must tell me." Our eyes dwelt together for a space. "Oh, tell me!" she gulped, with a sudden terror dilating her eyes. "It isn't—it isn't that—man come back!"
"Oh, no!" I shuddered involuntarily at the image she evoked of Pendleton. "Not that. Thank Heaven, Alicia, you're no Pollyanna; you see the worst at once." ”

“ I have ever been impatient of reading descriptions of nature and have chimed with the scoffers at the pathetic fallacy. Nevertheless, I can bemuse myself for hours listening to the wind among the tree tops or gazing at the haze upon the hills; and in a slow measured rhythm, as if having endless time before them, they invariably spell a message,—a message infinitely sad, but for the creative laughing sun that rides triumphant, high over all.
"Come, Alicia!" I broke out brusquely, joining the sun in his laughter, "we have some bright things to talk over. Don't let us allow the woods to lull us. ”

“ Dibdin would say that I reminded him of a broody hen, and Dibdin would be right. A broody hen is a model of responsibility for all mankind.
Yet though I cannot look with young-eyed confidence upon all of this, or upon my enterprise with Fred, I can hardly resist a feeling that something of the youth and manhood I have spent as a solitary among books, something stirring and effervescent that I have suppressed, is struggling for an outlet. Fred's methods of business, though I wince at some of them, fill me with gusts of irresistible laughter. His constant horseplay and good humor are infectious. ”

“ The children, having prospered and grown during the winter, are in need of new summer wardrobes, which I have ordered bought. If it is to be disaster, then shabbiness shall not betray us. Like the man who donned evening clothes in which to sink with the Titanic, I have always entertained a stubborn faith in the policy of good clothes. Policy, policy—the trail of policy is over me like a fetid odor—and how clean and unsmirched I have always felt in my stupid transparency! Gertrude, if she knew it, would now rejoice that she had thrown me over. ”

“ Care is the badge of incomplete lives. And what I needed was a letter from Dibdin.
A breath of the wide world has come to me with that pleasant burly note, of other-worldliness, of freedom, of rovings and wanderings, something of the zest I used to feel. I used to feel myself (or so I think) strung like a lute, sensitive to every breath and sign of beauty, to all the subtle tunes of life. My nerves are duller now, responsive only to the obvious. In the inverted world of business I suppose that is progress. ”

“ It was once the property of a Medici and has delighted the hours of popes, princes, dukes, lords; men have longed for it, have treasured it, loved it as men treasure and love diamonds or women. It is worth a moderate fortune. But I leave it neglected. I am waiting for the rattle of a tray and the entrance of the girl behind the tray. What would Rosenbach or any decent bookman say if they knew? But I don't care. Boccaccio himself would have approved me.
Alicia enters and the room is flooded with sunshine and I am quick with life.
"Why, Uncle Ranny!" Alicia pauses alarmed, tray in hand. ”