He remembered this at intervals, a little uneasy, a trifle conscious-stricken because he shrank from making an end to preparation—because he still loitered, disinclined to break the golden web and return to the clear, shadowless skies and the pitiless sun of the real world where he belonged, and where alone, he knew, was the workshop for which he had been so leisurely preparing.
Then the shock came—the bolt out of the blue.
The cablegram said:
I married Oswald Grismer this morning.
STEPHANIE.
CHAPTER XVI
He sailed in April. When he sailed, he knew he would not come back for many years, if ever. His business here was done, the dream of Europe ended. The cycle of Cathay awaited him in all its acrid crudity.
Yes, the golden web was rent, torn across, destroyed. The shock to his American mind left nothing of the lotus eater in him. He was returning where he belonged.
Married! Steve married! To Oswald Grismer, who, save as a schoolboy and later in college, was a doubtful and unknown quantity to him.
He had never known Grismer well. Since their schoolboy differences, they had been good enough friends when thrown together, which had been infrequently. He had no particular liking for Grismer, no dislike. Grismer had been a clever, adroit, amusing man in college, generally popular, yet with no intimacies, no close friends.