For Peter knew that he would always be the victim of his own laziness; that every impulse toward a broader life and its achievements would be checked and overcome by what he termed his "vast inertia." In spite of his mental capacity, his social gifts, his assets of birth and excellent appearance, he would go through all his years without attaining either honors or profits—merely because, in his unconquerable languor, he would not exert himself to the extent of reaching out his hand for them.
He taught in the seminary because he must; because, otherwise, his bread would go unbuttered, or rather, there would be no bread to butter. For he was the last of a family whose fortune had been their "blood" and their brains, and not their material possessions. Nothing had been left to him but the prestige of his birth and his inherited intellect, and the connections which they opened to him. And these connections were rosebuds for him to wear in his buttonhole rather than beefsteak to swell his waistcoat. They entitled him to lead a cotillion, but not to direct a bank.
His natural parts, as he fully realized, would at any time have secured a career to him, if he had had the industry to use them assiduously. A little enterprise, a little initiative would long since have despatched him to the opportunities and successes of a city. But, always defeated by the "inertia" which he regarded as a fatal malady of his temperament—and also, perhaps, by a native distaste for the vulgar scramble and unsavory methods of the modern business world—his fine intelligence wasted itself in small tasks and his ambitions dissolved like dream-stuff in the somnolent atmosphere of Shadyville.
The only success available to him under such conditions was an advantageous marriage. This he could more than once have accomplished, for it cost him no effort to practice the abilities of the lover, and he had, indeed, a reputation for gallantry that invested him with a dangerous glamour as a suitor. But here he was thwarted each time by a quality that dominated him as ruthlessly to his undoing as did his laziness—and this quality was fastidiousness. For him only the exquisite was good enough. He wanted a woman with a face like an angel or a flower, and a soul to match it. And this the eligible girl had never had. So, although he had several times reached the verge of a leap into matrimonial prosperity, he had always drawn back before the crucial moment. A laugh—just a note too broad and loud—had once restrained him from the easy capture of half a million. He could not live with a woman who laughed like that, he told himself!
And on the other hand, though marriage appealed to him, he could not accept the exquisite in poverty. A few years before, he had spent a summer in courting a girl whose profile had enchanted him. In imagination he saw it always against a background of dull gold—the pure, slender throat; the sweet, round chin; the delicate, proud lip and nostril; the dreaming eye. But in fact, there was no background of gold, dull or otherwise; and when Peter reflected on the size of his salary and the shifts to which poverty must needs resort—the shabby clothes, the domestic sordidness, the devastating finger-marks of weariness and anxiety upon even the fairest face—his courage failed him, and he surrendered the profile to one who could give her a Kentucky stock farm, a town house in New York and a box at the opera there.
After that episode, he resigned his hope of romance. Fate was perverse and offered him impossible combinations, and he had not the energy to seek and seize for himself. So love, like the other big prizes of life, eluded him, and at thirty-three he was a confirmed bachelor as well as a professional idler. He still pursued the graceful, aimless flirtations that are the small change of intercourse at dances and dinners—just as he still read Theocritus—but neither his heart nor his mind engaged in any more serious endeavor.
And yet, every now and then, he felt a faint desire for something more, for something that should not be a pastime, nor a mere bread-and-butter chore—something that would demand and exhaust the best of him and give him in return the pride of work worth the doing and doing well.
This afternoon the desire was more than usually persistent, and it had held him at his desk long after school hours were over, fingering his pen and ink bottle, glancing through the weekly essays which had that day been handed in for criticism, and turning the leaves of a history of English literature with which he had vainly striven to awake enthusiasm in the minds of his class.
The school-room was a pleasant place, as school-rooms go. There were potted plants on the window sills and a few good engravings on the walls, and the afternoon sunshine was streaming gaily in. But to Peter the room was the disillusioning scene of unwilling labors—both on the part of his pupils and himself—and its chalky atmosphere was heavy and depressing.
"What's the use of pretending that this is a 'life-work'—a 'noble profession'?" he muttered, after his casual examination of a particularly discouraging essay. "They don't want to learn. They only want to get through and away. After Sheila graduates, I'll he without a single responsive pupil. For I won't get another like her—not in years, and probably never. Why don't I chuck it all? Why don't I go away? There's nothing to stay for! But my confounded antipathy to a tussle in the hurly-burly of my fellow-men——"