Champney Googe was beginning to realize, as he stood on the porch with his mother and waved to his old neighbors, the Caukinses, the changed conditions he was about to face. He was also realizing that he must change to meet these conditions. On his way up from the train Saturday evening, he noted the power house at The Corners and the substantial line of comfortable cottages that extended for a mile along the highroad to the entrance of the village. He found Main Street brilliant with electric lights and lined nearly its entire length with shops, large and small, which were thronged with week-end purchasers. An Italian fruit store near The Greenbush bore the proprietor's name, Luigi Poggi; as he drove past he saw an old Italian woman bargaining with smiles and lively gestures over the open counter. Farther on, from an improvised wooden booth, the raucous voice of the phonograph was jarring the night air and entertaining a motley group gathered in front of it. Across the street a flaunting poster announced "Moving Picture Show for a Nickel." Vehicles of all descriptions, from a Maine "jigger" to a "top buggy," were stationary along the village thoroughfare, their various steeds hitched to every available stone post. In front of the rectory some Italian children were dancing to the jingle of a tambourine.
On nearing The Bow the confusion ceased; the polyglot sounds were distinguishable only as a murmur. In passing Champ-au-Haut, he looked up at the house; here and there a light shone behind drawn shades. Six years had passed since he was last there; six years—and time had not dulled the sensation of that white pepper in his nostrils! He smiled to himself. He must see Aileen before he left, for from time to time he had heard good reports of her from his mother with whom she had become a favorite. He thought she must be mighty plucky to stand Aunt Meda all this time! He gathered from various sources that Mrs. Champney was growing peculiar as she approached three score and ten. Her rare letters to him, however, were kind enough. But he was sure Aileen's anomalous place in the household at Champ-au-Haut—neither servant nor child of the house, never adopted, but only maintained—could have been no sinecure. Anyway, he knew she had kept the devotion of her two admirers, Romanzo Caukins and Octavius Buzzby. From a hint in his aunt's last letter, he drew the conclusion that Aileen and Romanzo would make a match of it before long, when Romanzo should be established. At any rate, Aileen had wit enough, he was sure, to know on which side her bread was buttered, and from all he heard by the way of letters, Romanzo Caukins was not to be sneezed at as a prospective husband—a steady-going, solid sort of a chap who, he was told, had a chance now like himself in the quarry business. He must credit Aunt Meda with this one bit of generosity, at least; Mr. Van Ostend told him she had applied to him for some working position for Romanzo in the Flamsted office, and not in vain; he was about to be put in as pay-master.
As he drove slowly up the highroad towards The Gore, he saw the stone-cutters' sheds stretching dim and gray in the moonlight along the farther shore. A standing train of loaded flat-cars gleamed in the electric light like a long high-piled drift of new-fallen snow. Here and there, on approaching The Gore, an arc-light darkened the hills round about and sent its blinding glare into the traveller's eyes. At last, his home was in sight—his home!—he wondered that he did not experience a greater thrill of home-coming—and behind and above it the many electric lights in and around the quarries produced hazy white reflections concentrated in luminous spots on the clear sky.
His mother met him on the porch. Her greeting was such that it caused him to feel, and for the first time, that where she was, there, henceforth, his true home must ever be.
"It will be hard work adjusting myself at first, mother," he said, turning to her after watching the wagonload of Caukinses out of sight, "harder than I had any idea of. A foreign business training may broaden a man in some ways, but it leaves his muscles flabby for real home work here in America. You make your fight over there with gloves, and here only bare knuckles are of any use; but I'm ready for it!" He smiled and squared his shoulders as to an imaginary load.
"You don't regret it, do you, Champney?"
"Yes and no, mother. I don't regret it because I have gained a certain knowledge of men and things available only to one who has lived over there; but I do regret that, because of the time so spent, I am, at twenty-seven, still hugging the shore—just as I was when I left college. After all these years I'm not 'in it' yet; but I shall be soon," he added; the hard determined ring of steadfast purpose was in his voice. He sat down on the lower step: his mother brought forward her chair.
"Champney," she spoke half hesitatingly; she did not find it easy to question the man before her as she used to question the youth of twenty-one, "would you mind telling me if there ever was any truth in the rumor that somehow got afloat over here three years ago that you were going to marry Ruth Van Ostend? Of course, I denied it when I got home, for I knew you would have told me if there had been anything to it."
Champney clasped his hands about his knee and nursed it, smiling to himself, before he answered: