The doctor's library had such a picture: it completed the story of the room, and it effaced everything else in it. In a somewhat darkened corner hung a framed photograph of his wife in her bridal dress made not long after their wedding. Once his photograph had hung beside it. The plaster where the nail had been driven in had either fallen out or it had been torn out. He never knew—he knew enough not to ask.
As for the photograph, there stood a young bride, looking into her future and trying to conceal from herself what she saw soon awaiting her: the life of a woman wedded but not loved. And there was recollection in the eyes too: that the man who had married her perhaps in the very breath of his wooing had wished she were another; that at the altar he had perhaps wished he were putting his ring upon another's hand; and that if there were to be children, he would always be wishing for them another mother.
The doctor sat there that morning trying to work at the books of the year. The rooms were comfortable; the children were away at the fireside of another man's wife; the servants did not dare disturb him; his horses waited in their stalls; it was the day on which he could begin to reap his golden harvest—a pleasant day for most men; but he could not see the blanks before him nor remember the names he filled in nor the figures that were for value received.
Because there lay open before him the Book of the Years.
And coming down toward him on the track of memory through this book was his life from boyhood to middle age: first the playing feet of the child that have no path as yet; then the straight path of the boy; then the winding road of youth; then the quickly widened road, so smooth, so easy, of a young man; and then the fixed deepening rut of middle age.
And now the rut of middle age had come to its forks: north fork and south fork; or east fork and west fork—he must choose.
Whoso cares to know where and how the doctor's life-path started and across what kind of country it had run until now, a middle-aged man, he sat there this day at the tragedy of its forking, may if he so choose follow the road by the chart of a narrative.
But let him remember that this narrative goes back into a society unlike that of to-day and into a Kentucky that has vanished. Back there are other manners, other customs, other types of men: a different light on the world altogether.