CHAPTER XXIV
MASON TAKES A VACATION
As Mason walked away from the lake that terrible day it seemed as if he had ceased to drift. The spirit of that grim helmsman appeared to have entered into him. Life was short and pleasures few. For fifteen years he had planned important things to do, but had never done them—feeling all the time the power to write latent within him, yet lacking stimulus. From the very first this girl had roused him unaccountably. Her sympathy, her imaginative faculty as well as her beauty, had come to seem the qualities which he most needed.
Could he have gone to his own fireside at once, the determining letter would have been written that night, but the routine of the office, the chaff of his companions, took away his heroic mood, and when he entered a car at twelve o'clock he slouched in his seat like a tired man, and the muscles of his face fell slack and he looked like a hopeless man.
After Rose went home he seemed to Sanborn to be more impassible than ever. As for Mason himself, it seemed as if some saving incentive had gone out of his life—some redeeming grace. He had grown into the habit of dropping in at Isabel's once a week, and Isabel had taken care that Rose should be often there on the same evening; and so without giving much thought to it he had come to accept these evenings as the compensating pleasures of his sombre life.
It was such a delight to come up out of the vicious pitiless grind of his newspaper day and sit there before the fire, with the face of a radiant girl to smile upon him. Her voice, with its curiously penetrating yet musical quality, stirred him to new thoughts, and often he went home at ten or eleven and wrote with a feeling of exultant power upon his book. After she went home he wrote no more; he smoked and pondered. When he called upon Isabel and Sanborn he continued to smoke and to ponder.
He had not abandoned his allegory in talking with Sanborn, and Sanborn and Isabel together could not get at his real feeling for Rose.
Sanborn asked one day plumply:
"Mason, why don't you marry the coolly girl, and begin to live?"