“More than ever.”
Bromley laughed. “A little chunk of solitude is what you need—time off in which to get used to it. Here is our bunk house. Capture a quiet corner in the lobby, if you can find one, light your pipe and have it out with yourself. I’m going to do a bit of shopping; buy me a bag and a few more articles of glad raiment.”
Philip halted on the hotel steps to frown down upon his late camp-mate.
“You’ve been your own man for nearly a full year, Harry. Don’t go and lie down now and roll your pack off like a fool jackass.”
This time Bromley’s laugh was a shout.
“So the good old New England conscience comes up smiling, after all, does it?” he chuckled. “Give it a pat on the back and tell it to go to sleep again, so far as I am concerned. I’m merely going to buy a bag and something to put in it, and I’ll promise you to come back sober as a judge. Want me to swear it?” and he held up his hand.
“I’d hate to see you ditch yourself now,” said Philip gravely; and with that he went in and found the quiet corner and sat down to fill and light his pipe.
An hour later he was still sitting in the corner of the writing-room alcove, with the cold pipe between his teeth, as oblivious of his surroundings as if he had been alone on a desert island. Realization was slowly coming. He was no longer a striving unit in the vast army of day-to-day bread-winners. Wealth, to which all things must bow and pay tribute, was his. Twice, and yet once again, he found himself taking the crisp bit of bank paper from his pocket to stare at it, to pass it through his fingers so that he might hear the reassuring crackle of it. To the possessor of that slip of paper, and of the treasure store of which it was assumptively only an infinitesimal fraction, all things humanly possible were as good as facts accomplished.
What to do with all this wealth? For an illuminating instant he was able to appreciate the embarrassment of those other lucky ones who, from having nothing but eager hopes, found themselves suddenly in possession of more money than they knew how to dispense. Desires, legitimate or the other kind, do not come into being in the turning of a leaf. They must have time in which to germinate and burgeon. Philip saw how easy it would be for the spendthrifts of luck to give free rein to the impulses of the moment, however grotesque or extravagant; more, for a passing breath he was conscious of the unfathered birth in himself of just such impulses. But the traditions quickly asserted their supremacy. It was not to breed a prodigal that his Trask and Sanborn forebears had dug a frugal living out of the reluctant New England soil. Whatever else might happen, there should be none of the antics of the mad and extravagant wasters.
It was thus that Bromley found him at the early dinner hour; still isolated in the quiet corner, and still with the long-since-extinguished pipe clamped between his teeth.