oat, and the throat of Sim Caley, with cigars. He had been glad to
return to the familiar, casual cigarettes, the generous bag of Green Goose
for five cents; Sim had reverted to his haggled plug. He had no desire to
build a pretentious dwelling--his instinct, his clannish spirit, was too
closely bound up in the house of his father and grandfather to derive any
pleasure from that.

After he had spent a limited amount, the principal at his disposal lay
untouched, unrealized. He got a certain measure of content from its sheer
bulk at his back; it ministered to his vanity, to his supreme self
importance. He liked negligently to produce, in Simmons' store, a twenty
or even fifty dollar currency note, and then conduct a search through his
pockets for something smaller. He drank an adequate amount of whiskey,
receiving it in jugs semi-surreptitiously by way of the Stenton stage;
Greenstream County was "dry," but whiskey in gallons was comparatively
inexpensive. He would have gambled, but two dollars was a momentous hazard
to the habitual card players of the village. He thought, occasionally, of
taking a short trip, of two or three days, to nearby cities outside his
ken, or to the ocean--Gordon had never seen a large body of water; but his
life had travelled such a narrow course, he was so accustomed by blood and
experience to the feel of the mountains, that, when the moment arrived to
consider an actual departure, he drew back ... put it off.

What he was subconsciously longing for was youth. He was instinctively
rebelling, struggling, against the closing fetters of time, against the
dilution of his blood by time, the hardening of his bones, the
imperceptible slackening of his muscles. His intimate contact with the
vigorous youth of Lettice had precipitated this rebellion, this strife in
which he was doomed. He would have hotly repudiated the insinuation that
he was growing old; he would still, perhaps, have fought the man who said
that he was failing. And such a statement would be beside the fact; no
perceptible decay had yet set up at the heart of his manhood. But the
inception of that process was imminent; the sloth consequent upon
Lettice's money was hastening it.

Lettice's youthful aspect, persisting in the face of her approaching
motherhood, disconcerted him; it was inappropriate. Her freshly-flushed,
rounded cheeks beside his own weather-beaten, lean jaw offered a comment
too obvious for enjoyment. He resented, from h