rison door first closed upon him. He had not forgotten
her, but he had not consciously mourned her. His loss, his ruin, had
been so tremendous that she had been swallowed up in it. When one's
whole system needs to be steeled to trouble and pain, single pricks lose
importance. He thought of her that day without any sense of sadness.
He imagined her in a pretty, well-ordered home with her husband and
children. Perhaps she had grown stout. She had been a slender woman. He
tried idly to imagine how she would look stout, then by the sequence
of self-preservation the imagination of stoutness in another led to the
problem of keeping the covering of flesh and fatness upon his own bones.
The question now was not of the woman; she had passed out of his
life. The question was of the keeping that life itself, the life which
involved everything else, in a hard world, which would remorselessly as
a steel trap grudge him life and snap upon him, now he was become its
prey.

He walked and walked, and it was high noon, and he was hungry. He had in
his pocket a small loaf of bread and two frankfurters, and he heard the
splashing ripple of a brook. At that juncture the road was bordered
by thick woodland. He followed, pushing his way through the trees and
undergrowth, the sound of the brook, and sat down in a cool, green
solitude with a sigh of relief. He bent over the clear run, made a cup
of his hand, and drank, then he fell to eating. Close beside him grew
some wintergreen, and when he had finished his bread and frankfurters
he began plucking the glossy, aromatic leaves and chewing them
automatically. The savor reached his palate, and his memory awakened
before it as before a pleasant tingling of a spur. As a boy how he
had loved this little green low-growing plant! It had been one of the
luxuries of his youth. Now, as he tasted it, joy and pathos stirred in
his very soul. What a wonder youth had been, what a splendor, what an
immensity to be rejoiced over and regretted! The man lounging beside the
brook, chewing wintergreen leaves, seemed to realize antipodes. He
lived for the moment in the past, and the immutable future, which might
contain the past in the revolution of time. He smiled, and his face fell
into boyish, almost childish, contours. He plucked another glossy leaf
with his hard, veinous old hands. His hands would not change to suit his
mood, but his limbs relaxed like those of a boy. He stared at the brook
gurgling past in b