All night long he alternately mused and dozed upon the problem. He roused up at early daylight with a feeling of doom upon him. He had made a mistake. He was not fitted to be a husband—he was a poor thing, at best, who had not had energy enough to get out of a groove nor to demand adequate pay for grinding in his groove. He lacked "push," and had dreamed away the best years of his life, at least such parts of the years as he had saved from the merciless drive of his paper. He was pulp, squeezed dry.
He groaned, and a curse came upon his lips, and his forehead knit into a tangle of deep lines. His paper had used him. It had sucked the blood of his heart. The creative energy of his brain had gone into the impersonal columns of the editorial page—to what end? To the end that the Evening Star Publishing Company should be rated high in Bradstreet. Had any human being been made better by anything he had written in those columns? Politics? Good God! he had sold his soul, his blood, the grace of his limbs, the suppleness of his joints, the bloom of his enthusiasms, to put this or that damned party into power.
And now, when a beautiful young woman, singing her way to fame, had sent for him, he must go to her, cynical, thin-haired, stiff in joints, bent in shoulders and reeking with the smell of office life and, worst of all, worked out, his novel not yet written, and his enthusiasm turned to indifference and despair.
The problem of the age that morning made him savage. He looked out of the window at the farmhouses gleaming in the early light, at the smoke curling up into the still air, at the men going to milk the cows—
"The damn fools!" he said in his heart. "They don't know enough to vegetate any more than I had sense to know I was becoming a machine. Rot and rot! So we go like leaves to the muck-heap." The porter rushed in and shook him.
"Almos' to Bluff Siding, sah."
This put a little resolution into his blood, and he dressed rapidly, with little thought on anything else. Once or twice he looked out at the misty blue hills, cool and fresh with recent rains. As the porter came to get his grip a few minutes later, Mason wondered how he should meet her, with a hand-shake or a kiss? How would she meet him?
As the train slowed down he saw her at the platform. She sat in a carriage waiting for him. He had one flashing thought: "There sits my wife!" It startled him. The tremendous significance of that phrase made his brain dizzy for a moment.
She was dressed trimly, he noticed, as he came toward her, and she held her horse firmly—he liked her for that, it showed self-mastery. As for him, he felt more uncertainty of footing than ever before in his life, and tried to throw off the stoop in his shoulders.
As he came forward, she flushed, but her steady eyes met his unwaveringly. He looked into their clear obscurity of depth, wherein were purity and unworldly womanly ways.