e influences," Stanchon began again, abruptly, "currents ... I
don't know--they feel them more than we do. And they exert them more,
too. We admit one and doubt the other."

He squeezed a half lemon into his glass with a beautiful, firm-wristed
wrench, extracted the pips with one deft circuit of the spoon, and
poured rock candy into the acid. Over this he dropped in silence a
measured amount from a squat foreign bottle at his elbow and filled the
glass from a carafe of distilled water.

"It's a queer thing altogether--I don't know what makes me think of
it," he began, "and I wouldn't have dared tell it when it happened.
Now I can tell anything--I suppose--being sixty and an eminent
alienist. Lord! Times goes and goes, and just as you get to where you
could use it to advantage--well, the young ones need the room.

"Nervous! What are nerves, anyhow?

"Sometimes I think I know ... a little ... but the time is so short, so
short!"

He drank half his glass.

"There comes a time," he said abruptly, "when you first discover what a
gnat in a whirlpool you are. I mean that after you've done everything,
played perfectly fair and followed all the rules, arranged your
combinations and observed the reasonable results for so long that you
begin to think you've got hold of the System--something happens, and
it's all upset again--flat anarchy. We get it different ways, I
suppose. As if a runner bumped into a brick wall on the home-stretch
... strange!

"I was in one of those little cities--Detroit, Cleveland--it doesn't
matter. I've lived in both. It's a good size for a doctor--I got all
kinds--and I learned fast, there. Nice people, too. I always had an
eye for real estate, and what I made, I put into that. I had a good
horse, and as I drove about I kept my eye on the property and the way
the town was growing. One day I noticed that an oldish looking,
comfortable sort of house, a little off from the centre of things, was
for sale, and it struck me suddenly that there was a pretty good sort
of house to own. It had trees around it and nice paths and a neat
little new stable, and there was something in the long, low lines of
it--no gingerbread or 'Jim Fisk' business or bands of coloured
paint--that appealed to me. It attracted me--you see? Good God!

"I saw the agent and he put a price that surprised me. But the owner
wanted to leave town immediately and had made it very low, to get the
cash. He'd had hard l