Felix had not recalled that scene for years; it had hurt too much. But now it was no longer painful. He saw the scene for the first time impersonally; and he felt that the principal had been right....
Gazing down at the manuscript in his hand, he pronounced sentence upon it in the words in which the principal had once condemned that boy. “This is what is known as egotism,” he whispered.
He rose, stuffed the pages into Tom’s fireplace and set fire to them with a match. Then, while the record of all his futile dreaming went up in smoky flame, he turned back to the desk, sat down, and bent over the microscopic squares and confused lettering of the street-map of Chicago.
III. Plans
1
COMING home, Felix found a letter from Helen Raymond, congratulating him on his decision to go to Chicago, and enclosing two letters of introduction, one of them to an editorial writer on an afternoon paper, the other to some one at a settlement house.
Helen was, he perceived, like Tom, a romanticist. She would be quite capable of believing that these little pieces of paper assured him a welcome in Chicago!... She had, with a kind of pathetic maternal fussiness, taken his destinies in charge; and Felix rather wished she hadn’t. She had even directed him as to which train he should take on Monday—apparently confident that some one, in response to her suggestion, would be at the station to meet him. As if people in Chicago had time for such amenities!
It was in the mood of one who goes alone against the enemy, that Felix took the train to Chicago. And armed with a paper sword! For so it was that he thought of his letters of introduction. Of what use were letters of introduction in Chicago? Well he knew how unconscious Chicago would remain of the arrival of one more poor struggler. His coming might mean everything to him, but it meant nothing at all to Chicago. That was the obvious truth, and why not face it?