e
had no love to give in return. It was movingly wonderful--though awful
in a way--to feel this tonic answering of slack chords to the full,
resonant notes struck from the blazing lyre of youth....

VI

Loring had said that he would be "good" if Sophy did not banish him
altogether, and he was, very "good." It was the goodness of a spoilt
child that swallows physic for the spoonful of jam to follow. The jam in
Loring's case was represented by the hours that he was allowed in
Sophy's presence. He had not known himself capable of such self-control.
Altogether, his love for Sophy had revealed to him as it were another
man cased within the man that he had heretofore thought was himself.
This new man was of more sensitive stuff, finer and yet much stronger
than the other man had been. It was something like having a sixth sense
bestowed on him--this new appetency for all manner of things towards
which until now he had only felt a vague indifference. His life, since
college days, had been made up of sport, occasional spurts of travel in
wild places, girls--to a moderate degree--the usual convivial, surface
intercourse with other young bloods--some ennui, generally dispelled by
drink (the average young American's ordinary indulgence in "high-balls"
as a panacea for tedium).

Loring had an excellent, but lazy, mind. At Harvard he had read law.
Once out of college, he had dropped it promptly. He had inherited
fifteen millions at his father's death, when he was only twenty-one.
What was the use of moiling away at law? The property was looked after
already by a firm of the most distinguished lawyers in New York. He
could see no "sense" in racking his brain with work that bored him when
this work was absolutely without necessity. So he had spun in gay
peripheral circles with the wheel of life--until meeting Sophy. Now she
had drawn him to its centre. It was strange how his consciousness, thus
centrifugally established, seemed another consciousness. Only the
present was real--this radiant and somewhat awful present in which he
loved Sophy as he had not believed that human beings could love. His
past seemed like a dull, cheap volume of gaudy colour-prints. He could
not realise that he had moved through those vulgar pictures of the past.
_This_ Morris Loring, he felt, had not been part of them. He flared hot
with shame, merely in glancing back at them. Yet his life had not been
really shameful--in the grossest meaning of the