Now, the door opened. The silence of the hall whence Mr. Deering stepped back beside him, taking up his tea-cup, brought out a memory of her voice. It had been low and vibrant. Quincy thought, without too great awareness why, of a velvet casing over a silver knife. Then, Mr. Deering continued the conversation.
In a few minutes, Quincy, with a poise that himself was stranger to, arose and left.
He admired Professor Deering for having so beautiful a wife. Then, she was beautiful—this Julia Deering, whose first name he had not lost? It occurred to him that she had been very beautiful indeed, framed there, in the doorway....
VII
Now came the Christmas vacation.
A time of ill-suppressed anticipation in a college town. Spirits soar and marks descend. Men laugh more readily; kindness comes to the surface of expression. Charity and self-indulgence, disguised as a fine denial conscious of its temporary being, give life a buoyancy. Energy juts into the future, leaving the swamp of deserted channels for the present. Eyes and mind and above all, the softer sense, wait upon the morrow. There is an abstinence about, as of guests before a feast not quite ready to begin.
And then, the last day, the last hour. The swift march of feet bedecking the frozen station road like flowers. The ring of voices in prospect and good wish, fretting the grey air like tendrils of warm sun. The mad largess to drivers; the luxury of lugging fat valises; the display of bright neckwear and urban suits. There may be slush and ice on the station road-way, but there is spring in the feet that tread it.
Quincy, also, went home for his Christmas vacation. He was one of the few that felt these things about him. Most were in these things, making their sum. He was outside, so he felt and understood. The glitter and ring grew and transformed in him, as he forsook them. Things spiritual too, however fair, have shadows, when they stand within the flood of some subjective sun. So stood these bright things to Quincy’s spirit. Their shadows broadened upon him. And they made him gloomy; for the shadow, even of a painted picture, will be dark.
When he reached New York, with home before him, he smiled ironically to himself. The grey loom from the past brightness was wide across him. He bethought himself that he was going jerkily, obtusely, through a set of motions meaning nothing to him. He was partaking of a ceremony without its spirit. It was a deep and pregnant ritual for these others—home turned host, home in a roseate smile and at attention. So much the hollower did its successive rhythms sound in his own emptiness. For without the promise of felicity, what is baptism but an untimely wetting? Yet, he was caught within this process and with one speed, one exterior, he had been lifted up and hurried homeward. If he lacked knowledge of his own direction, he saw the pomp of promise of the others. And in this combination, his spirits fell and his eyes and lips grew subtly vagrant, as if they had desired to escape from the pain whereof his face was symbol.
A home of prophets would have understood this boy’s distress, launched on them at the set, rigid hour of vacation. But in his home if he came upon it as he was now, journeying uptown, the sullen silence would be received as if the mark were already known, shrugged at with the sole possible comment that one had hoped for college to have bettered him. All this, as well, Quincy understood.