At her grandfather's suggestion she walked down to the gate with him, to point out a short cut across the fields to Mrs. Powers's. Outside the gate he paused, hat in hand.
"Miss Polly," he began, as if unconsciously taking her into his confidence, "old times never come back again. Seems as if the bottom had dropped out of everything. I've done my best to resurrect them, but I can't do it. I thought if I could once get back to the old place I could rest as I've not been able to rest for twenty years—that I'd have a month of perfect enjoyment. But something's the matter.
"Many a time when I've been off at some fashionable resort I've thought I'd give a fortune to be able to drop my hook in your grandfather's mill-stream, and feel the old thrill that I used to feel when I was a boy. I tried it the day I came—caught a little speckled trout, the kind that used to make me tingle to my finger ends, but somehow it didn't bring back the old sensation. I just looked at it a minute and put it back in the water, and threw my pole away.
"Even the swimming-hole down by the mill didn't measure up to the way I had remembered it. I've fairly ached for a dip into it sometimes, in the years I've been gone. Seemed as if I could just get into it once, I could wash myself clear of all the cares and worries of business that pester a man so. That was a disappointment, too. The change is in me, I guess, but nothing seems the same."
Polly knew the reason. He had tried so long to mould his habits to fit his wife's exacting tastes, that he had succeeded better than he realised. He could not analyse his feelings enough to know that it was the absence of long accustomed comforts that made him vaguely dissatisfied with his surroundings; his luxuriously appointed bathroom, for instance; the perfect service of his carefully trained footmen. Mrs. Powers's noisy table, where with great clatter she urged every one "to fall to and help himself," jarred on him, although he was unconscious of what caused the irritation. As for the rank tobacco Bowser furnished him when he had exhausted his own special brand of cigars with which he had stocked his satchel, it was more than flesh and blood could endure. That is, flesh and blood that had acquired the pampered taste of a millionaire whose wife is fastidious, and only allows first-class aromas in the way of the weed.
But Polly knew another reason that his vacation had been a failure. She divined it as the little Yale pin, stuck jauntily into the front of her white dress, met the touch of her caressing fingers. The girl in the pink cotton gown was long dead, and the woman who had grown up in her stead had no part in the old scenes that he still fondly clung to, with a sentiment she ridiculed because she could not understand. There must always be two when you turn back searching for your lost Eldorado, and even the two cannot find it, unless they go hand in hand.
Next day Bowser had another piece of news to impart. "Mr. Maxwell went home this morning. He told Mrs. Powers it was like taking a vacation in a graveyard, and he'd had enough. He'd have to get back to work again. So he paid her for the full month, and took the first train back to the city."
"Well, I'll be switched!" was Bud Hines's comment. "If I had as much money as he's got, I'd never bother my head about work. I'd sit down and take it easy all the rest of my born days."
"I don't know," answered Bowser, meditatively. "I reckon a man who's worked the way Mr. Maxwell has, gets such a big momentum on to himself that he can't stop, no matter how bad he wants a vacation."