As Spurrier gave himself up to the relaxation of reminiscence with that abandon of train travel which admits of no sustained effort, he began comparing this life, left over from another era, with that he had known against more cultivated and complex backgrounds.
Then in analytical mood he reviewed his own past, looking with a lengthening of perspective on the love affair that had been broken by his court-martial. His adoration of the Beverly girl had been youthful enough to surround itself with young illusions.
That was why it had all hurt so bitterly, perhaps, with its ripping away of his faith in romantic conceptions of love-loyalty.
He wondered now if he had not borne himself with the Quixotic martyrdom of callowness. He had sought to shield the girl from even the realization that her lack of confidence was ungenerous. He had sought to take all the pain and spare her from sharing it. But she had solaced herself with a swift recovery and a new lover, and had he been guilty she could not have abandoned him more cavalierly. Well, that softness belonged to an out-grown stage of development.
He had seen himself then as obeying the dictates of chivalry. He thought of it now as inexperienced folly—perhaps, so far as she was concerned, as a lucky escape. His amours of the present were not so naively conducted. To Vivian he had paid his attentions with an eye watchful of material advantages. They belonged to a sophisticated circle which seasoned 101 life’s fare rather with the salt of cynicism than with the sugar of romanticism. Yet the thought of Vivian caused no pulse to flutter excitedly.
The glimpse of Glory had been refreshing because she was so honest and sincere that she disquieted one’s acquired cynicism of viewpoint. One might as well spout world-wisdom to a lilac bush as to Glory! Yet there was a sureness about her which argued for her creed of wholesome, simple things and old half-forgotten faiths which one would like to keep alive—if one could.
Snow drifted in the air and made a nimbus about each arc light as Spurrier’s taxi, turning between the collonade pillars of the Pennsylvania Station, gave him his first returning glimpse of New York. He had come East in obedience to a wired summons from Martin Harrison, brief to curtness as were all business messages from that man of few and trenchant words. The telegram had been slow crossing the mountain, but Spurrier had been prompt in his response.
A tempered glare hung mistily above the Longacre Square district through the snow flurries to the north, and the rumbled voice of the town, after these months in quiet places, was to the returned pilgrim like the heavy breathing of a monster sleeping out a fever.
At the room that he kept at his club in Fifth Avenue—for that was a part of the pretentious display of affluence made necessary by his ambitious scheme of things—he called up a number from memory. It was a number not included in the telephone directory, and, recognizing the voice that answered him, he said briefly: