No More Learning

'Do you see that little fat man coming out of
the Square and staring at me? I was engaged to him once. Look at the
four old ladies behind him, shaking their bonnets at me. Each has some
story about me, and it will be all the same in a hundred years. '

After this he had hardly a moment's peace. She kept him continually
going to theatres, operas, parties. These last were an especial
trouble; for it was her wont to gather about her an admiring circle to
listen to her extravagancies, and he was no longer at the age when we
enjoy audacity for its own sake.


VIII

Gradually those bright eyes of his imagination, watching him from
letters and from among the fourteen flies on the ceiling, had ceased to
be centres of peace. They seemed like two whirlpools, wherein the order
and quiet of his life were absorbed hourly and daily.

He still thought sometimes of the country house of his dreams and of
the garden and the three gardeners, but somehow they had lost half
their charm.

He had written to Howard and some others, and commenced, at last, a
letter to Mary Carton. It lay unfinished on his desk; a thin coating of
dust was gathering upon it.

Mrs. Leland called continually on Mrs. Sherman.
She sentimentalized
over the lovers, and even wept over them; each visit supplied the
household with conversation for a week.

Every Sunday morning--his letter-writing time--Sherman looked at his
uncompleted letter. Gradually it became plain to him he could not
finish it. It had never seemed to him he had more than friendship
for Mary Carton, yet somehow it was not possible to tell her of this
love-affair.

The more his betrothed troubled him the more he thought about the
unfinished letter. He was a man standing at the cross roads.

Whenever the wind blew from the south he remembered his friend, for
that is the wind that fills the heart with memory.

One Sunday he removed the dust from the face of the letter almost
reverently, as though it were the dust from the wheels of destiny. But
the letter remained unfinished.


IX

One Wednesday in June Sherman arrived home an hour earlier than
usual from his office, as his wont was the first Wednesday in every
month, on which day his mother was at home to her friends. They had
not many callers. To-day there was no one as yet but a badly-dressed
old lady his mother had picked up he knew not where. She had been
looking at his photograph album, and recalling names and dates
from her own prosperous times. As she went out Miss Leland came in.
She gave the old lady in passing a critical look that made the poor
creature very conscious of a threadbare mantle, and went over to Mrs.
Sherman, holding out both hands.